Earthdance Short-Attention-Span Environmental Film Festival

Exerpts from an Article in SF 360:
By Robert Avila

Who says it’s not easy being green? If you ask the folks behind the Bay Area-based Earthdance Short-Attention-Span Environmental Film Festival, engaging films with positive and eye-opening ecological themes can not only be easy but high fun. And they’ve been proving it since 2004, with an annual spate of short films covering a gamut of environmental subjects and stylistic approaches while studiously avoiding the doomy.
“We’re living at a time when we need stories that connect people, bring them together and inspire hope,” explains festival director and founder Zakary Zide. “We wanted to reach out and be more inclusive.” Doing so meant highlighting the humor, adventure and sheer wonder of the natural environment and the place of human beings in it. Rather than targeting single issues like global warming or the coming water crisis, EarthDance aims to be a bridge between art, nature and science. In that sense, says Zide, “It’s not even political.”

Neither is it (entirely) frivolous. Zide has a background in ecology and art and he’s even dabbled in filmmaking, documenting his own environmental sculptures à la Andy Goldsworthy and Rivers and Tides. The impetus behind founding an environmentally themed film festival had as much to do with what he and his colleagues at the Oakland Museum weren’t seeing in media representations of the natural world. “Too much gloom and doom,” he says. “Where was the fun? The weird? The quirky? And we didn’t want to be preached to.”

Over the past five years, unlike some of the more soused members of the animal kingdom (Oh, bee hive!), EarthDance has remained clear-headed and on the move. It’s reached out to audiences internationally, traveling thus far to Mexico, Canada, Ireland, Denmark and Israel and becoming in Zide’s words “a mobile, global event,” screening in 35 cities and venues worldwide. But it continues to premiere every year here in the Bay Area at the Oakland Museum, where it’s found a receptive home from the beginning. “We got our start at the Oakland Museum, and the museum continues to be the lead sponsor,” says Zide. Meanwhile, “the quality of the films has increased tremendously, as well as the number of international entries.”

It may look deceptively pint-sized, but with dozens of film festivals annually in the Bay Area’s teeming cinema ecosystem, EarthDance’s ability to succeed on its own modest but popular terms is no small achievement. “EarthDance sets itself apart by not taking itself too seriously,” explains Zide. “And that’s why I think it appeals to a broad audience. We’re like the SF International Film Festival on Ritalin meets Spike & Mike with a green, jet-age twist.”