Greening Film Festivals

Abstract

In this chapter we seize the momentum of the pandemic crisis and its disruption of the film festival world to consider festivals’ stake in the climate and ecological crisis. We will delineate three layers of concern that need to be considered holistically when taking on the challenge of greening film festivals. The first layer tackles the context of festival operations, namely, all arrangements and preparations required to organize festival events. The second layer addresses the emergent discourse of environmentalist media studies, which urges festival scholars to consider critically the consequences of the virtualization of film festivals. The third layer puts the “eco” back into “ecosystem.” The phrase “festival ecosystem” itself is becoming popular in the discourse on film festivals. We think that the time is right to bring what we are calling the festival ecosystem back into a more literal relationship with “environmental media,” media infrastructure and its material relations to the biological environment. This will entail a rethinking of how that ecosystem can be made to work in balance with our planetary needs regarding its natural resources and include acknowledging there are the limits to widespread festival mechanisms that are rooted in logics of growth and abundance.

This publication was supported by funds from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC, Canada) Insight Development Grant “Buffering Online and Off” and from the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

[…] a Niagara of printed paper […] Huge amounts of texts were pouring out every day. (Dayan 2000, 52)

In this chapter we seize the momentum of the pandemic crisis and its disruption of the film festival world to consider festivals’ stake in the climate and ecological crisis. Juxtaposed to the immediate risks of the global health crisis, a range of environmental issues causes our planet to suffer longitudinal adverse effects that are threatening livability on earth. In the long term, environmental hazards pose risks more severe than epidemic and pandemic outbreaks, and awareness of the need to make structural changes now in order to avert future ecological disasters is growing. According to a recent newspaper report, “Two-thirds of people around the world said climate change is a global emergency” (Carrington 2021), based on a recent study by the United Nations Development Programme (“The Peoples’ Climate Vote” 2021). Film festivals have played a role in raising awareness about environmental issues through the power of film, both thanks to the persistent programming and agenda setting of thematic film festivals dedicated to eco-issues¹ and on account of the buzz, critical acclaim, and impact created by major festivals around films that promulgate environmental concerns, such as An Inconvenient Truth (David Guggenheim, 2006).² Yet, while public concern worldwide over global warming has never been greater, progress toward making necessary transitions in the film festival world itself is falling behind. Therefore, Covid-19 offers a welcome opportunity to take a step back and reassess from an environmentalist perspective the mechanisms, practices, and logics that have been powering film festivals. At a time when regular festival flows are breached, there is space to imagine what a “new normal” might be in the post-Covid festival world.

We seek to commence this future-oriented discussion. Evidently we are very much at an early stage in such a formulation and our approach will lean toward the exploratory. Drawing on a variety of sources we point toward important issues to be raised and directions to be taken. We will touch upon three layers of concern that need to be considered holistically when taking on the challenge of greening film festivals.

The first layer tackles the context of festival operations, namely, all arrangements and preparations required to organize festival events.³ Awareness that operations logistics ought to be laid along an ecological yardstick is growing among both festival organizers and visitors as concerns about climate change and the environmental crisis are gaining weight. In order to make the transition toward greener practices in the festival world, substantial efforts are needed. In particular, Covid-19 is making us face the facts regarding film festivals’ share in harmful air travel.

The second layer addresses the emergent discourse of environmentalist media studies. There has been a notable recent increase in interest in environmentalist critique in visual and media studies (Belkhir and Elmeligi 2018; Chang, Ivakhiv and Walker 2019; Shriver-Rice and Vaughan 2020; Stine 2018). What can film festival scholars learn from it and in turn contribute to the area? The Internet infrastructure has long been masked and kept tidily out of the view of most of the population (Carruth 2014; Crawford 2021). Let’s consider critically the consequences of the virtualization of film festivals, among other online media streaming. In this section we will warn against simplistic framing of virtual events as green solution.

The third layer puts the “eco” back into “ecosystem.” The phrase “festival ecosystem” itself is becoming popular in the discourse on film festivals in which “ecosystem” takes its more general figurative sense beyond the original association with biological environment. We think that the time is right to bring what we are calling the festival ecosystem back into a more literal relationship with “environmental media,” media infrastructure, and its material relations to the biological environment. This will entail a rethinking of how that ecosystem can be made to work in balance with our planetary needs regarding its natural resources. In a salute to the Club of Rome ⁴ we call upon festivals scholars and professionals alike to consider the limits of widespread festival mechanisms that are rooted in a logics of growth and abundance.

Blue Skies

The success of An Inconvenient Truth on the film festival circuit stood at the beginning of what is arguably one of the most effective campaigns to raise international public awareness on issues of climate crisis.⁵ One of the most memorable moments in the film is when Al Gore uses the dramatic power of data visualization to persuade his audience of the alarming state of global warming. We see him deliver his presentation on stage before a huge screen. He shows a graph with CO₂ emissions over the centuries and their correlation with temperature change. The pattern appears cyclical until the present age when the curve turns into a steep upward, almost vertical line. Gore stands on a rising scissor lift for the climax: if no action is taken, the line continues to move up and up until it goes off the chart and off the screen.

It is standard scientific practice to rely on data for monitoring the condition of our environments, measuring immediate effects and predicting long-term developments. It is a more recent phenomenon to see an increase in use of such data in the public domain to raise green awareness. In the 1980s when the problem of acid rain garnered widespread visibility in Europe and North America, media coverage relied heavily on alarming scenarios featuring dying trees, corroding monuments, and lakes floated with dead fish. The underlying scientific story of harmful SO₂ (sulfur dioxide) and NO_x (nitrogen) emissions was told, but reporting and governmental campaigns were carried by dystopian imagery. In the late 1990s William Rees’ striking metaphor of the ecological footprint propelled a turn to datafied discourses. He co-developed the notion of ecofootprint (Ecological Footprint Analysis) as a practical model for measuring impact on the environment (Wackernagel and Rees 1996), thus ushering in an era in which calculators for measuring impact would move into mainstream discourses on sustainability. Media coverage of today’s best known environmental calamity—global warming—does not revolve around footage of melting icecaps and polar bears stranded on thin ice floes, rather such audiovisuals are part of multimodal communication strategies that equally deploy data visualizations and data infused discourses to maximize their effect.

In the film world, calculators for carbon footprints and other practical tools have been on the rise for a decade. Notable initiatives for green film production are the American Green Production Guide (GPG)⁶ and the European Green Film Shooting platform.⁷ The GPG Toolkit includes a sustainable practices checklist (PEACH/PEACH+), carbon footprint calculator (PEAR), and plywood tracking worksheet (PLUM). In Europe, various institutions provide information and advice on sustainable filmmaking and offer their own calculator tools: such as Carbon’Clap (EcoProd collective, France 2010), Albert carbon calculator (developed by the BBC in 2010, adopted by BAFTA in 2011), E-mission carbon calculator (Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds, Flanders 2014), and the MFG carbon calculator (Medien- und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg, Germany 2017). In the film festival world an equivalent does not yet exist. While much has been written on the importance of the meanings produced and circulated by film festivals, nothing has addressed their refuse and environmental costs.

In his pioneering study of Sundance Film Festival, anthropologist Daniel Dayan writes,

While Park City officials kept showing films and throwing parties, a Niagara of printed paper was spelling out meanings, offering captions, telling and retelling daily events until they reached a stable, paradigmatic form. Huge amounts of texts were pouring out every day. Some preceded the event, some looked at it in retrospect and many ran parallel to the festival. One could talk of a double festival: the visual festival of films and the whole of Park City as ‘the written festival’. (Dayan 2000, 52) [emphasis added]

Dayan’s original point in this passage was undoubtedly to draw our attention to the impressive textual production of meanings circulating throughout the festival. With a different, more environmentalist lens, we may now appreciate it for its acknowledgment of the materiality of the ephemera and documents produced by and around the pre-Internet festivals of the 1990s. Where did this “Niagara of printed paper”⁸ end up, after all? Did anyone ever seriously consider the ecological impact of so much waste?

Starting to think about greening film festivals begins with the acknowledgment of their ecological footprints. Besides learning from initiatives for green film production, we can turn to the sector of green event management for insights into the various areas of impact. Green Events Nederland, for example, draws on Kate Raworth’s Doughout Economy model (Raworth 2018) and the UN sustainability goals (“THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development” 2021) to distinguish between six areas of direct impact.⁹ Once festivals have a good sense of the components that make up their ecofootprint, they can move to monitoring their use of resources and/or adopt smart practices that will lower the footprints in those areas. As such, Dayan’s Niagara of printed paper is indicative of the need to leave old-fashioned “Take, Make & Dispose” approaches behind and adopt greener “Reduce, Reuse & Recycle” practices (www.greenevents.nl/areasofimpact/).

Film festivals may start with low hanging fruit but will certainly have to address the highest areas of impact in order to achieve green practices that are most effective. This shall make mobility a priority area for film festivals in the period ahead of us. Aviation has a major impact on climate change. Flying is the most climate-intensive form of transport and has been one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) in the past 20 years (“Flying and climate change” 2021). While more and more people book flights, especially in affluent countries, it still is only a very small percentage of the world population that can be considered a regular flyer. In 2019 the aviation industry produced 2.4% of global CO₂ emissions and was responsible for about 5% of global warming due to the CO₂ emissions plus other gases and water vapor trails (Timperley 2020). Growing awareness that flying bumps personal carbon footprints, however, has not weakened the curve of airline passenger growth and chances to mitigate the climate impact of air travel seemed slim at the start of 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic, however, caused an unprecedented decline in world passengers traffic and brought the festival flux of people transferring to and from events to a standstill.¹⁰ Earlier crises like the Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991 and the Financial Crisis of 2008 had caused stagnation in air travel. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon too put a temporary hold on passenger growth and led to implementation of enhanced securating measures (Clark et al. 2009). But the clear impact of these historical markers pales in comparison to the 2020 situation. A key concern in light of climate change and sustainable development goals is whether Covid-19 will mark the moment a structural shift in industry and consumers’ behaviors regarding air travel will be forged. Bringing it back to this chapter’s topic, will the “new normal” see a reduction of film festivals’ gross aviation footprint?

While individuals should assess whether flying is necessary or if there are alternatives, organizations and businesses must take on their responsibility as they become more aware of the environmental consequences of their actions. Companies can reduce the requirements on their staff to fly, promote other forms of travel, prioritize the use of conference or video calls, and, if flying is necessary, book the least harmful flights (newest aircrafts, economy class, direct flights), even if these are more expensive (Timperley 2020). Film festivals need to take such criteria into consideration as well when arranging guest travel and opt for partnerships and sponsors that invest in sustainable mobility.

Covid-19 has brought about creative responses to the social condition of life under the pandemic, some of which will likely remain in some form or another. The increased virtualization of film festivals is one of our specific concerns here.¹¹ Looking through the environmentalist lens, the pandemic period of forced experiments with virtualized forms of industry events and filmmaker participation is—at least partly—a blessing in disguise. Out of necessity many film festivals have tried out alternatives to the physical events that do not depend on extensive traveling of film festival visitors. Festival organizations now have a broader palette of possibilities at their disposal, some on-site, some online, others taking hybrid forms. If we assess the mood in the film festival world correctly, the hybrid model is here to stay, even if it is not embraced by all festival organizations. Yet we are only at the beginning of finding out how it can be unfolded in the most ecofriendly way.

By way of example, we mention some promising sustainable directions to consider. First, holding Q&As via live video connection could become a common practice that coexists with in-person festival appearances. Many film festivals have a two/three-night policy in which filmmakers are flown in to attend the screenings of their film and pay a snap visit to the festival. This generates a high-speed rotation of festival guests, which weighs heavily on festival’s mobility footprint. Greening festivals’ guest policies would entail thinking about criteria for stricter selection—for example, in-person visits for premiers and retrospectives, quota for other program parts—and slowing down the turn-around rate of hosting. Festivals could opt for directing their resources to hosting fewer invited quests for a longer period. When guests provide and enjoy multiple benefits with in-person festival visits—outreach, networking, training (giving and/or receiving), and so on—their traveling and aviation footprint can be justified. Other guests will be able to participate and make a meaningful contribution to the festival in virtual form.

Second, the option of hybrid markets should be further explored. The combination of physical and virtual components grants professionals the choice to attend at a distance. If such a mix is embraced industry-wide, individuals could adhere to a personal flying-diet or company-imposed flying quota plan. It is not unlikely there will be plenty professionals who are not so eager to return to a job that requires them to live in the air and spent significant amounts of time away from home when ways to execute (parts of) their work alternatively have been tried and tested. The industry needs to take its responsibility in reducing requirements and changing practices. Having experimented with virtual alternatives, professionals are in a much better position to reflect when and how often the face-to-face encounters have added value for whom, and what online counterparts work well, well enough or perhaps even better.

Let us be clear, we are not arguing film festivals should give up organizing physical events and markets nor stop hosting international guests or making use of air travel altogether. In-person encounters and collective experiences are festivals’ bread and butter and vital for sustaining the diversity, transnational collaboration, and international exchange that are driving our global film cultures and industries. However, the pandemic moment offers an unprecedented opportunity to make progress on the issue of mobility from a sustainability agenda. Do we want to return to a crowded airspace or strive for blue skies? How can the total number of film festival-related flights be reduced compared to 2019 levels? Which alternative green practices need to be embraced by the global film industry and festival world now in order to prevent a U-shape scenario,¹² in which the pandemic drop in world airline passenger traffic is followed by an accelerated rise and return to the curve of continuous growth?

Heavy Clouds

As festivals have digitized and virtualized themselves over waves of adaptation and cost-cutting, the range of media employed by festivals has expanded much since the 1990s. Moreover, we have witnessed the related processes of digitization and going “paperless” since Dayan’s study was published (De Valck 2008). While printed paper is still important at major film festivals, an assortment of electronic documents and video- and live-streaming initiatives have been tested out during the pandemic, some have become routine, others are still in an experimental phase. However, while the shift to digital and virtual lowers festivals’ footprint in some areas, it increases impact elsewhere exponentially: energy use.

The music industry has led the way in new technology adoption in the past and continues to do so today. Figure 16.1 “From Tape Deck to Tidal: 40 Years of U.S. Music Sales” (Richter 2021) shows the decline of physical media and rise of streaming and other digital media over the last few decades. Video (and television) is following a similar path. As Zielinski (2020) recently noted, before the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic our total Internet activities consumed as much energy as the entire airline industry, namely, about 2% of all energy consumption worldwide. As detailed earlier, the airline industry today is facing its own severe crisis, while we are keeping ourselves distracted by streaming and bingeing our favorite series and films online at home, so it is reasonable to anticipate that our Internet activities have overtaken the airline industry at least for the duration of the pandemic and that the estimate of 2% will need to be adjusted upwards. In his essay-manifesto “Cinema and Media Pedagogy in the Streaming Era” Lucas Hilderbrand posits the following acknowledgment as a part of an environmental media studies consciousness-raising strategy to be placed in the context of university and college courses and conferences. He states,

Fig. 16.1

“From tape deck to tidal: 40 years of U.S. music sales” (Richter 2021) (CC BY-ND 4.0)

Streaming media has a significant carbon footprint due to the high energy usage necessary for data storage on servers, for transmission, and for playback. The scale of emissions depends on both the energy sources (fossil fuels create more impact than renewable ones) and the amount of data streamed (higher-definition streams use more energy than standard-definition ones, and video requires more energy than audio). Although migration to renewable energy sources has improved, demand for streaming content and bandwidth has accelerated even more. You can reduce your carbon footprint by reducing how much you stream, by reducing the resolution of your playback, by dimming your device, and by lobbying your energy provider and government regulators to switch to renewable energy sources. Broadcast sources (such as radio), tangible media (such as vinyl records and DVDs), and collective viewing (such as in a movie theater) have a lower carbon footprint than everyone individually streaming music and audiovisual media. (Hilderbrand 2020)

He then goes on to lay out a program of action that ought to be implemented in cinema and media studies courses that screen videos. Evidently, not only university students are in need of this consciousness-raising. “Festival studies” much like the larger umbrella field of “media studies” presupposes an infinite raw resource of materials that goes unnoticed in the discourse. Somehow media takes place. Somehow we are able to email, text, upload, or “share” a photo of our cat or latest meal with a friend on their device. Somehow we are able to search, load, and watch a seemingly unending list of YouTube or Vimeo videos. Somehow we are able to access, choose, load, stream, and binge our favorite series on demand. As the material consequences become more and more tangible and evident to large segments of society, it is crucial to engage in an environmental critique of streaming and other forms of virtualization, all the more because these have been boosted during the pandemic.

The special conditions of the global pandemic on households in relative isolation have significantly hastened a sharp increase in online video-on-demand streaming services worldwide and smaller decreases in physical media (DVD/BluRay), old broadcast and pay television, according to Fig. 16.2 “Pandemic Gives Streaming Another Boost” (Buchholz 2020). Much against the grain of Hilderbrand’s manifesto, the tendency now and in the near future strongly favors streaming video and music over the older formats. How do we as film or media studies scholars take into account such changes and their consequences not only formally or textually but also in relation to energy consumption?

Fig. 16.2

“Pandemic gives streaming another boost” (Buchholz 2020) (CC BY-ND 4.0)

In the last few years there has been a striking growth of scholarship on the material consequences of media, new and old, their energy infrastructure, as well as the material composition of the media technologies and mobile devices. In the first issue of the Journal of Environmental Media,¹³ founding editors Shriver-Rice and Vaughan lay out their expansive meaning of

environmental media studies, as both a range of topics and as shorthand for an emerging interdisciplinary subfield, refers to applied academic studies motivated by the need to address problems at the overlapping spheres of environmental issues and the production and use of new media. (Shriver-Rice and Vaughan 2020, 3)

The guiding principles that undergird this nascent interdisciplinary field of environmental media studies take a narrow view of media with an emphasis on digital screen culture that “treat[s] the digital as material rather than virtual: the Internet and its infrastructures exist in real spaces that use resources in measurable and destructive ways,” which is very important to our aim in this chapter. The writers continue in a note,

reading this article on an iPad requires extensive precious metal mining, and may not actually be more environmentally friendly than holding the printed page in your hand if your iPad is connected to a power grid run on ‘dirty’ energy and receiving information from server farms thousands of miles away. (Shriver-Rice and Vaughan 2020, 3–4)

Their example brings to our attention the materiality of our digital habits, namely, the elements required to manufacture our devices and the quality of the energy required to run the Internet servers that keep data available to us 24/7 as well as the local power grid. The Internet has become a rich resource with great potential, but its infrastructure is neither magical nor without material consequence. Therefore it ought not to be overlooked when measuring individual, institutional, and corporate footprints. Awareness of the impact of energy consumption in media-use habits can be raised by making their materiality visible—showing images of massive data centers popping up like mushrooms across the globe, wind and solar parks that are changing landscapes—and also by using tools, calculators, and datafied discourses similar to the ones leveled at others parts of society.

Let’s consider a handful of proposals. First, media artist Jason Livingston proposes developing a “speculative app” that identifies “streaming times and data transfer quantities, and [translates] those into energy consumption and thus into IRL consequences” (Livingston 2020) such as the Carbonalyser smartphone app developed by The Shifters to monitor our energy consumption through online streaming (“‘Carbonalyser’: The Browser Extension Which Reveals the Climate Impact of Internet Navigation” n.d.).¹⁴ Second, media scholar Laura Marks offers a cogent analysis and useful suggestions for reducing the carbon footprint of online streaming. She writes, “[c]alculating the environmental impact of streaming video requires identifying the energy source at each point, from data centers to end user. While this varies greatly among countries and regions, currently about 80 percent of global electricity is generated from fossil fuels” (Marks 2020b). In the same article, a method to calculate estimates of the amount of energy consumed in video streaming is developed. She elucidates,

For example, I stream thirty-five hours of video a month to my computer at 1080-pixel resolution. The energy that this requires is 382.36 kWh. According to the EPA calculator, that’s 2.68 metric tons of CO₂. It’s equivalent to the CO₂ emissions from 30.4 gallons of gas consumed by a vehicle, or the carbon sequestered by 4.5 tree seedlings grown for ten years. (Marks 2020b)

This certainly unsettles any naïve intuitions one may have concerning the material effects of streaming habits. Marks also offers a series of general recommendations to media consumers on lowering their carbon footprint, namely, stream less, use physical media (USB drives), watch films at cinemas, watch broadcast/cable television, consider high resolution for special occasions, borrow DVDs from the library, pay carbon offsets, lobby governments to include carbon taxes in the business model of Internet providers, avoid the HD option on cameraphones, and slow the frequency of replacing cellphones. To media producers, she recommends that they make “works in versions: one for live screening or installation, another for streaming” (Marks 2020b) See also Marks (2020a).

As film festivals follow through on the impulse to virtualize themselves, the work and recommendations of these ecominded media scholars offer valuable starting points for thinking the ramifications of virtualization through. What will be clear from the above is that moving things online does not constitute a quick fix for greening film festivals. The more we rely on the convenience of the cloud, the heavier this become. The cloud metaphor is quite deceptive in masking how cloud computing depends on large-scale industrial server farms with its connotation of being airy and light, immaterial and intangible (Carruth 2014). Ultimately, everything comes at an environmental cost and it will be a matter of weighing and measuring the various components of festival organization in a holistic way. A large auditorium or square filled with festival viewers will easily trump on-demand streaming to individual users in sustainable use of energy. But if such collective gathering includes ample international visitors relying on long-distance travel, this ecological advantage, evidently, is annulled.

Green Futures

Thinking forward, we are anticipating not only changes in how film festivals are designed, run, and experienced, but also how they are studied within an expanded environmentalist media framework. As a growing awareness of and consensus over the fact of climate change becomes more pressing, not only will our actions and technology in our everyday worlds be questioned and transformed but also the questions we ask and research we pursue as media and festival scholars.

The time is right to put the “eco” back into the film festival ecosystem, a metaphor itself that is gaining popularity vis-à-vis other terms, such as the international film festival circuit, the film festival network, and, more recently, film festival world(s).¹⁵ With our environmentalist glasses on, we need to cast a critical look at drivers in this film festival ecosystem. Kenneth Turan, seasoned film critic and author of Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made, already pointed at festivals’ most prominent characteristic; that they are everywhere and a “growth industry” (Turan 2003). While the proliferation of film festivals is often lamented, the system’s logics of growth is not commonly contested. After all, the reasoning behind their expansion is the ever shrinking space for foreign-language, independent, and other peripheral films in mainstream distribution. Festival expansion is fueled by desires to preserve and promote diversity, to use film to educate or activate audiences, and by agendas to protect (minoritized) industry interests against conglomerate power.

A similar yet distinctly less idealistic version of this logic, however, can be found underlying film festival management and funding. Many festivals are in the business of orchestrating abundance and compete with each other not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively. In a crowded film festival world, size matters. The festivals in the top tier of the hierarchy reassert their position with a demonstrative use of resources—branded visibility, lavish parties, red-carpet fashion displays. But also in the lower tiers and on the level of audience festivals a taste for plenty is leading; a typical festival offers accessibility to more films, events, and ancillary programming than any individual can consume during the event. Is it notoriously tricky for festivals to downsize.

With the advent of neoliberal modes of governance, the pressure on festival organizations to be accountable toward their sponsors increasingly leans on datafied forms. Funders require measurable proof of impact, and festivals comply by providing the statistics. Evidently, not everything lends itself to the quantifiable approach, so the parameters that do gain more weight in the system’s logics, creating a self-generating effect. Let’s zoom in: a typical key performance indicator is the number of guests attending. Festivals count how many official attendees are welcomed, in what capacity they are visiting and where they are from. They also keep track of general audience numbers. Visitor growth is a sign of success, consolidation is stagnation, and decline really sets of funders’ alarms, with the perverse effect of setting the incentive for festival organizations to pursue growth. This can have catastrophal consequences from an environmentalist perspective.

The Cannes Market, for example, claimed a record number of participants in 2019: 12,527 attendees, representing 121 different countries (Variety 2019; Goodfellow 2019). The Cannes Film Festival and market together boosted no less than 40,000 visitors with official accreditation that year, including around 4500 press accreditions (France24 2019). That is a doubling compared to the 2004 level of 20,000 (Follows 2014). Picture these numbers as data visualization and you will see a graph that coincides exactly with the rising curve of pre-Covid world passenger air traffic development.

Our plea here is to seize the pandemic moment to review the logic of growth at film festivals and consider its limits. We call upon scholars and professionals alike to start rethinking the film festival ecosystem, finding green solutions or tweaks to common festival habits and practices and drafting film-festival-specific sustainability goals to make things happen. There are plenty of inspirational initiatives that can point us toward green futures, some of which have been around for years,¹⁶ others freshly hatched during the pandemic. Let us provide some detail on one of these by way of a concrete case study.

The innovative online environmental media activist Small File Media Festival¹⁷ made its debut during the pandemic August 10–20, 2020. Based at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, it is already planning its 2021 edition. According to its website the festival introduces itself as celebrating

low-bandwidth movies that stream with no damage to the planet! Streaming video has an alarmingly high carbon footprint: it’s the cause of about 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But these movies at under 5 megabytes each—about the size of a small PDF file—show that great cinema doesn’t have to mean great big files. (“Small File Media Festival” 2020)

The organizers choose an estimate for video streaming instead of that for overall online activity. The proposition here is to advocate for smaller-size video files that require less bandwidth in their streaming and therefore reduce the carbon footprint. Its larger aim is educational while calling attention to the fact that “streaming media has a massive carbon footprint” (“Small File Media Festival” 2020).

The inventive “small file” videos themselves were curated into thematic programs¹⁸ by a team of three, namely, Faune Ybarra, Radek Przedpełski, and Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva. The festival continues the tradition of low-fi (low-fidelity) or small gauge media, for example, Super-8 film festivals, where the “small file” critically challenges professional formats and standards. Not surprisingly, many of the films were short in duration and of an experimental nature that tested out formal qualities enabled by the small-file constraints of the medium. Under “solutions” on the festival website, the organizers suggest two poetic strategies to the potential videomakers, including the clever use of sound and still image as in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), and the ephemeral media demoscene computer presentations. On the other hand, they offer technical solutions on how to compress video via several digital editing software such as Handbrake and Avidmux. The festival is clearly niche but important to consider. While the much larger international film festivals have significantly different aims and occur at a much large scale, the aim here is to encourage better, environmentally informed “greener” practices in creating videos, particularly for streaming.

While this “tiny file” festival is far from the major international film festivals, it provokes us to reconsider a variety of aspects of festival design. It is through the heightened awareness of the environmental consequences of the design of film festivals and the activities that constitute those festivals that we bring a biological and especially the environmentalist sense of “eco” back to the concept of “ecosystem” that currently circulates within the discourse on festivals. Moving people or things in space and time, whether physically or virtually, doubtless has material consequences in the real world, as we have argued above. Travel, particularly via air, and online streaming together compel us to rethink the nature of the mapped-out festival circuits or networks in a more material sense and ask questions concerning the consumption of resources and the accumulating carbon footprints of the festivals concerned. It seems reasonable to posit that the abstract mapping of the flow of films and people in physical or virtual space now needs to take into account the environmental cost involved.

Final Remarks

Generally, our collective magical thinking that we somehow live in a Newtonian universe of infinite time, space, and resources needs to be adjusted in the light of the current climate crisis. More specifically, as film festival researchers and organizers, our approach to festivals ought to be influenced by the emergent environmentalist critique as it expands media studies.¹⁹ As festivals virtualize and become accessible online from anywhere in the world, how will that new structure alter other ones? Will the value of having several regional or national festivals continue from the public-funding perspective of a government funding agency, if all are equally accessible online? The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified and sped-up the process of virtualization of film festivals and proliferation of festivals with virtual components. Perhaps we will witness the rise of exclusive in-person boutique festivals, such as the Telluride Film Festival, as alternatives to mass gatherings, but will it come with extended virtual access at a distance and at the expense of some exclusivity? Perhaps local festivals will increase in popularity as people realize that their on-demand streaming habits contribute to their individual carbon footprints. Perhaps industry agreements on regional markets can lower the pull of the larger international film festivals and reduce need to travel to each. Evidently, these are only a handful of questions and consequences that we anticipate to grow in importance in the near future.

As research continues to develop in this nascent area and the results disseminated, festivals themselves will surely be able to devise greener practices, as noted above, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. Covid-19 has put film festivals’ resourcefulness to the test, but also crafted space for future-oriented contemplation. As such, there has never been a better time to start thinking seriously about greening film festivals.