The Planet in Focus 13th Annual Environmental Film Festival is taking place in Toronto this week – October 10-14 and I’m going! It is Canada’s largest environmental film festival with more than 70 movies and documentaries from Canada and around the world. Some of the filmmakers will be there too.
On Saturday (October 13) it’s a special day for kids at the festival. They have a free screening of some great eco short films and then an animation workshop.
For more information you can visit their website: www.planetinfocus.org
They sent me some films to preview and I wanted to tell you about two of my favourite ones.
The Girl And The Fox
Director: Tyler.J Kupferer
This is a short film. I mean, really short. It’s only 4 minutes long but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. The movie is about a girl hunting out for a fox. When she found the fox and was about to kill the fox they looked into each other’s eyes and she decided not to kill him. The fox ran away back into the woods and the girl was running home when it started to snow. She fell in the snow and seemed to be hurt and closed her eyes. The fox saw her and noticed that she was alone and was cold. The fox crept up to the girl and curled around her so she would be warm and safe.They fell asleep. I’m not going to tell the ending, but what I learned from this movie. Sometimes animals aren’t always mean or scary. But I did promise my parents that I wouldn’t make friends with a fox. I liked this movie a lot!
YERT (Your Environmental Road Trip)
Directors: Ben Evans and Mark Dixon
This documentary is about 3 friends – 2 boys and 1 girl – who go on an environment road trip for a year. My favourite quote of theirs was “Our awesome planet has an awesome problem. Us.”
They drove to a lot of cities and talked to a lot of people about the environment and different things that people were doing across the United States to be more eco. While they travelled, they were trying to create a less garbage. They’re going to restrict their garbage to to one shoe box full a month. After the first month on the road they sorted through their garbage, piece by piece. Half of what they had was able to be recycled and the other half was bag true garbage. Their goal was to reduce all of their waste – both garbage and recycling. They said that even recycling is bad because it takes up a lot of energy.
They visited Terracycle – they make products from garbage. It’s cooler than it sounds. They use packaging from chip bags and juice boxes. They made duffle bags out of kool aids and they made a lunchbox out of cookie bags. I even have a business card holder made of a Lay’s Chip bag! It was cool to see the people who made it.
When their eco road trip was over they had only 11 shoeboxes full of garbage! They created that little garbage! The people at Terracycle explained that “garbage is something that is entirely man-made. It does not exist in nature.”
I really enjoyed watching their experiment and watching the amazing and interesting things along the way, they participated in every city they went to!
There are people everywhere making small changes to make a big difference.
This movie is not from the kids selection for the festival, but I really liked it. It was really interesting to follow their journey. They were funny and really believed in what they were doing. I learned a lot with them through their road trip. I would recommend this movie for anyone – kids too. You can learn more about YERT at their website, http://www.yert.com.
Tyler J. Kupferer says
Director here. Glad to hear “The Girl And The Fox” was among one of your favorites, Hannah. It’s a very personal film and I love knowing it touches other people emotionally as well. You know the girl in the film is 9 years old, just like you!
Thanks for the review and keep up the great work!
callmehannah says
Thank you so much Tyler! It’s really cool that the director from ‘The Girl And The Fox’ commented on my blog! I’m so happy you liked my post! That’s awesome that the girl in the movie is 9 years old! If you want to inform me a about anything just e-mail me or my parents. I also think the movie is personal, the film definantly made me emotional.
Thank you again for commenting!