This was one the whole town rolled out the red carpet for, and I was a little shocked to see how much of the off-campus community came to see it. I put off some work to make it during the weekend, and I had to squeeze myself past six people to find one of the only empty seats in the theater. The next-oldest person in the room must’ve had ten years on me at least, and I tried not to be a nuisance or write notes too loudly.
I’d made it to one of the more broken-up showings of short films, reasoning that there were better odds of my enjoying them than an all-or-nothing feature. I think it was the right decision, too, because the short timespan kept everything informative and beautiful without allowing for any dragging. The films I saw covered a lot of ground and a lot of causes, including bird migrations, dams that need to be opened, using genetics to reinvigorate the redwood tree, and undetonated mines with coral reefs growing over them.
I have to wonder if the other people there had just come so they could be told about how many problems there are with the environment, and how many donated to any of the filmmakers (every one of them was asking for money, because the festival was about raising awareness of problems more than celebrating nature). I remember them all as being townies, because they looked older and relatively affluent, but I know some of them must have come a ways to see the festival. It feels weird to think that my homestead gets chosen as a host for these sorts of events.
The best part of the afternoon, though, was the movie about cicadas, which had no experts, no voiceovers, and not too much information about them except for some text about their life cycles. It was completely beautiful, the kind of thing I might’ve expected to see on the Discovery channel when I was a kid, and full of swarms of bugs which would’ve looked completely disgusting otherwise. I never realized before then that cicadas don’t have any survival mechanisms beyond their sheer numbers, or how their metamorphoses can go wrong, or how their offspring get back beneath the ground. (When I was a kid, I assumed they were just sleeping and came up for air every seventeen years.)
On the whole, it was a pretty cramped affair, but it offered a wider view of the world, and I always appreciate that. I didn’t know what to expect when I went in, but I know now that the people most invested in protecting and preserving nature are also the people who most appreciate its beauty, and I’m all for handing them film cameras more often.
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