Special Category: Moving Creatures
Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn't easy.
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
In partnership with Cool Boulder, Moving Creatures is a call to artists for new short and feature documentaries that align with a thematic 90-minute block for the Mimesis Documentary Festival. With the increasing frequency of catastrophic floods, wildfires, fatal heat waves, and droughts, people are witnessing the consequences of climate change in their own lives. This leads to feelings of isolation and powerlessness, particularly when the solutions seem so far outside any of our control. A missing piece of the conversation is the significant role that degradation of living and social systems play in the climate crisis and the equally impactful and interconnected biodiversity crisis. Protection of nature and restoration of degraded lands, waterways, and oceans is critical for the future of the planet. The media’s narrative paints a dire situation focused on technological fixes controlled by leaders mired in political division, which leads to cynicism and a generation losing hope for their future.
The aim of Moving Creatures is to explore and question the existing narrative, and find hope and purpose through transformative storytelling to create connection and empowerment. Local communities, individuals, and indigenous peoples from around the world are taking matters into their own hands to heal the land in cities, farms, and natural areas through connections within their own communities and new partnerships, creating a movement built of collective action.
Artists are invited to explore the journey we’ve traveled and how we can find a new path to reconnect with the living world and with each other. People and all living creatures on our planet are moving towards an uncertain future. Each of us and every living being from the tiniest ocean plankton and bacteria living in the soil to elephants and whales are connected and dependent on each other through a dynamic web of life. Our actions are undermining the foundation of the planet’s life support systems, hurtling us down a path of ever-increasing risk. As we fill in wetlands, plow up grasslands, and cut down forests to build scorching cities of asphalt and concrete filled with water-hungry lawns or expand the millions of acres of chemically intensive agriculture, the once rich and thriving ecosystems below and above ground are disappearing. Carbon and water are the glue that hold the web of life together. As these webs unravel, the carbon and moisture bound together by life in soil is lost to the atmosphere contributing to climate change, and runs off into rivers, estuaries, lakes and oceans, choking fish, plants, and corals.
As intact and functioning habitats dwindle, movement, a critical and natural part of existence at different scales for different creatures, is fraught with obstacles and impediments. Will a butterfly find enough nectar as it searches the landscape for patches of flowers? Can a bird find enough insects to feed its nestlings or survive its journey to a wintering ground? Where do we go as our homes are flooded or our farms don’t have enough water to grow food? How do we mend and repair the social fabric that is unraveling alongside the web of life?
Submissions to this category are reduced in price by $20, and are automatically entered into juried competition for up to $5,000 in prize money for outstanding features and shorts (pending final programming decisions).