Projects in genres: Climate / Environment

Synopsis

The Catskill Game Farm was America's first ever private zoo, fostering beloved childhood memories for a generation before falling into disrepair and closing in 2006. Amongst the rubble, filmmakers discover reels of home movies which would expose a shocking new chapter of the zoo's history. Official Selection Tribeca Film Festival 2026 - World premiere Official Selection SXSW London 2026

Synopsis

In a remote village in southeast Turkey, 35-year-old Meryem begins the annual olive harvest. For generations, the groves have sustained the village women's livelihoods, but this year, the harvest takes place under a shadow of fear. Following a devastating earthquake that destroyed Meryem’s home, 60% of the village’s olive lands have been seized by the government to build a new satellite city. As the concrete edge presses steadily toward their remaining fields, this harvest may be their last. Once a stay-at-home mother, Meryem picks up a camera to document the slow unraveling of her community. Women, previously confined to the home, step into public life - leading protests, sit-ins, and a landmark lawsuit alongside thousands of indigenous landowners, to protect the land they have tended for centuries. Interweaving Meryem’s video diaries with observational footage, the film moves between intimate scenes of the family harvest and the female-led resistance. As the movement unfolds, the once-perfect harvest is gradually disrupted by destruction. HERE TO STAY tells the story of a people’s fight for justice, tracing how tragedy transforms Meryem from mother to resistance leader, as she seeks to protect the land she calls home.

Synopsis

At the crossroads of art, activism, and the ocean lies the extraordinary story of Paolo Fanciuli, a humble Italian fisherman with a revolutionary vision. Known as Paolo the Fisherman, he has waged a quiet but fierce war against illegal bottom trawling - one of the most destructive fishing practices threatening marine ecosystems. Driven by years of witnessing the ocean's decline, Paolo devised a radical and poetic solution: the creation of an underwater museum—a surreal seabed installation of massive marble sculptures. These works of art serve a dual purpose: they physically block trawling nets from destroying the seafloor, and they symbolically stand as monuments to resistance and hope. HOUSE OF FISH is a conservation documentary that blends Paolo’s intimate, personal journey with a natural history perspective on the fragility of our oceans... a cinematic ode to the sea and to those who dare to protect it through creativity and courage. By spotlighting Paolo’s efforts and the power of artistic activism, the film aims to awaken a deep emotional connection to our oceans - and inspire urgent action to save them.

Synopsis

For centuries, fisherman Stan Rennie and family worked the waters off England’s North East coast . But when a vast tide of poisoned crabs washes ashore like a biblical plague, Stan’s world is turned upside down overnight. Dealing with the devastation of his business and failing health, he is thrown into a battle for the future of the region where he’s spent his entire life, an unlikely figurehead for a grassroots campaign to find the truth, delivered the only way he knows how - with heart and gallows humour. A film about the grief of navigating a world suddenly, inexplicably, irrevocably altered. Official Selection CPH:DOX 2026 - F:ACT Competition - World premiere

Synopsis

The idyllic English countryside. An intensive dairy farmer called Derek. One day his neighbour, also a Derek, forsakes tradition, and starts to turn his land over to wild nature. The film charts the two Derek's turbulent, funny relationship as tempers fray, wild animals escape, and the land is transformed. Official Selection Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival 2026

Synopsis

In isolation on Iceland’s Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Nigerian-born modular synthesis artist Colloboh transforms glacial and oceanic recordings into sonic compositions - uncovering a dialogue between ice and sea that reshapes his understanding of consciousness, ecological collapse, and humanity’s place within both. As his process unfolds, Colloboh transforms these sounds into layered sonic works that blur the boundaries between observation and communion. The film culminates in a haunting gesture: he plays the completed composition back to the landscape itself, completing a dialogue between artist and environment. A meditation on impermanence, consciousness, and the fragile bond between humanity and the natural world. Official Selection SXSW 2026 - World Premiere

Synopsis

In the remote Siberian Arctic, an Indigenous Sakha scientist descends into the depths of the melting permafrost. Searching for an ancient creature, he makes his way through the dangerous, claustrophobic caves to the mythical realm of the Underworld. Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2026 - Berlinale Shorts - World premiere

Synopsis

It’s no secret that Declan is the university class coaster, which is why his friends refuse to partner with him on their next assignment. Out of options, Declan is forced to pair up with Claire, the new Deaf student who is everything Declan isn’t; academic, driven and fiercely proud of her identity. Set against the backdrop of coastal university life on the south coast of England, GREEN GRASS dips into the murky waters of strained friendships, sustainability, and D/deaf identity in this coming-of-age drama.

Synopsis

A 20-minute single-player immersive VR experience that places users inside the body of Zoraan, a British-born Sikh woman navigating menopause amidst climate collapse and the ruins of colonial medicine. You breathe with her. You scream with her. You dance your way out of sedation. Blending real-time visuals, bio-haptic feedback and diasporic sound, this work reframes menopause not as decline but as volatile power; closing ‘The Baby Factory’ to ignite a cultural revolution. Using gesture, voice and biometric feedback, audiences become co-conspirators in a volatile act of embodied rebellion. This is not a metaphor. This is an insurgency. Official Selection SXSW 2026 - XR Competition - World premiere

Synopsis

In a post-Brexit Europe, deadly viruses are for sale and espionage is back in business. Sick with the terminal virus that killed all her team, an ex-special agent has vivid dreams of the partner whose death she's responsible for.

Synopsis

In extreme cold, the human body can turn against itself through paradoxical undressing: failing nerves mistake freezing for heat, compelling the dying to shed their last protection. In 水托邦 HYDROTOPIA, hydrophones frozen into ice capture the material disintegration of their frozen body as a projected film gradually emerges into clarity. The film follows British-Chinese artist Jamie Man suspended by hooks pierced through flesh in a winter landscape, practising rituals rooted in Shiva-dedicated traditions that explore a state of perpetual non-being. As the ice surrenders its form and the image sharpens into focus, transformation itself becomes the subject: matter abandoning one state for another, the body held suspended between dissolution and emergence. Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026 - World premiere

Synopsis

A feature documentary journeying into the depths of the COP climate conference in Dubai. Are these enormous get-togethers all about false promises that hinder change? Or are they the only hope we've got for world-saving unity? With his innocuous selfie-stick, filmmaker Josh Appignanesi moves unnoticed through Dubai's seductive slickness to reveal the talks, meetings and backroom parties behind the strange mixture of global cry for help and political jostling that is a COP. Lost in translation, he comes face to face with the irony of an oil baron hosting this last-chance climate saloon in a techno-utopian leisure city -- that, er, happens to be built in a burning desert. But then the business-as-usual is ruptured by a searing encounter with indigenous voices from the frontline of climate injustice…