The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival is celebrating its 26th year and will host a variety of film screenings, speakers, concerts, and talkbacks. The 2023 edition of the festival runs from March 20 through the first week of April. The festival will be hybrid, with both in-person events and screenings hosted by Ithaca College and partner Cinemapolis.
This year’s festival theme is POLYPHONIES.
Polyphonies joyously combine a number of parts, each with an individual melody in harmony with the others. This layering of different voices, practices, and perspectives is not only found in music but across the arts, politics, technologies, and ecologies.
Conceptually, polyphonies offer an embrace of the many, the multiple, and the diverse into a more energized whole, rejecting the singular, the mono, and the linear.
Visual Politics of Crisis — March 23
The Visual Politics of Crisis conversation with Julia Tulke and Leah Shafer is on Thursday, March 23, from 7-8 p.m. EST on Zoom. This conversation between visual anthropologist and art historian Tulke and media scholar Shafer will question how public art practices and collectives intersect with cities in crisis such as Athens, Berlin, and more.
Julia Tulke’s work bookends with the 2008 economic crisis and the 2020 COVID pandemic. Her innovative work intertwines exploration of a polyphony of new visual forms in public spaces with critical analysis. Her research and writing are far ranging, looking at artist-run spaces, street art and graffiti, austerity urbanism, creative placemaking, and queer and feminist protest.
Climate Grief and the Appalachian Floods — March 24
The Park Center for Independent Media will be co-sponsoring several of the events in collaboration with FLEFF, starting with a roundtable conversation unpacking the multiple voices of Appalachia, the floods, media representations, diverse communities, and climate grief. The discussion will take place on Friday, March 24, from 1-2 p.m. on Zoom.
This event brings together three contributors to The Edge, the online magazine of the Park Center for Independent Media, to open up an urgent and significant dialogue about Appalachia, the floods, the environment, film and media representations, literature, and climate grief as multi-voiced and multi-layered ways to understand this important but often overlooked region in the United States.
Speakers include Anna Creadick, Matt Holtmeier, and Chelsea Wessels. Moderated by PCIM director Raza Rumi.
“Secret Sharers” International Book Launch — March 27
On Monday, March 27, Jennifer Spitzer discusses her new book, “Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis.” This conversation takes place on Zoom, from 7-8 p.m.
Secret Sharers traces a genealogy of secret sharing between literary modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on the productive entanglements and intense competitive rivalries that helped shape Anglo-American modernism as a field.
Jennifer Spitzer is Associate Professor of English at Ithaca College. She writes and teaches at the intersection of transatlantic modernism, psychoanalysis, modern spiritualism, the medical humanities, and gender and sexuality.
The event will feature an introduction by Claire Gleitman, Dean, School of Humanities and Sciences at Ithaca College. IC alum Robert Volpicelli will be conducting the interview.
Artificial Intelligence Roundtable — March 30
On Thursday, March 30, 5:30 p.m. FLEFF will host a Roundtable on How AI Disturbs the World in Textor 101 on the Ithaca College campus. This will feature new media scholar and contributing writer to The Edge Heidi Cooley as well as other authorities and researchers in conversation about the disturbances, disruptions, resets, and possibilities as Artificial Intelligence rewires our worlds.
This roundtable asks how we think about the resets, re-thinkings, and re-wirings AI unleashes. What is it? How does it work? What are the implications for life as we used to live it?
Greg Palast Master Class — March 31
Lastly, PCIM and FLEFF will be hosting a master class on the connections between documentary filmmaking and investigative journalism. Internationally renowned investigative reporter Greg Palast will run this informal master class about the skills, strategies, tools, and conceptual thinking necessary to undertake investigative journalism that packs a punch and changes thinking.
Greg Palast is known for his investigative reports for The Guardian, BBC Television, Rolling Stone, and his string of New York Times bestsellers including “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.”
His latest film, “Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman” is narrated by Rosario Dawson and produced by Martin Sheen.
The master class will take place on Friday March 31, from 3-5 p.m. in Park 332 on the Ithaca College campus.
“We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir” Book Launch — April 6
Acclaimed novelist and Ithaca resident Sorayya Khan will launch her new novel, “We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir” on April 6 at 7:30 p.m., via Zoom.
Khan is the author of three novels: “Noor,” “Five Queen’s Road,” and “City of Spies,” which won the Best International Fiction Book Award at the Sharjah International Book Fair. Her work appears in Lit Hub, Guernica, Longreads, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Oldster, Journal of Narrative Politics, The Kenyon Review, and more, and her fiction is included in several anthologies. She is the winner of a Malahat Review Novella Prize and a Fulbright Scholar Award.
“We Take Our Cities with Us” is a Pakistani-Dutch writer’s multicultural memoir of grief and immigrant experience that illuminates the complexities of identity and inheritance in a global world.
PCIM is also co-sponsoring several film screenings (some free and some ticketed) which will take place at Ithaca’s local independent theater, Cinemapolis, including “Babi Yar. Context,” “Blue Island,” “Matter Out of Place,” “The Natural History of Destruction,” “Powerlands,” “Time of Pandemics,” “Wild Lens Collective.”
A screening of “Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman” will feature a talkback with filmmaker Greg Palast and Raza Rumi moderating.
For the full list of films and showtimes check here.
For the full schedule of FLEFF events check here.