The Global Sustainability Film Awards in London Award Two Films On NE
Guwahati: Two Northeast Indian films, one about rhino conservation in Assam and the other about water scarcity in Cherrapunji one of the wettest places on earth took home awards at the 2022 Global Sustainability Film Awards in London.
The tve GSFA, now in its eleventh year honours exceptional films from the media, business, non-profit and creative industries that motivate viewers with practical ideas for a more sustainable future.
While the film from Assam, “Bad Blood”, by VICE Media won in the Greener Living Short Film Award category, the special tve Trustee Choice Award was given to “Water for Life” by Green Hub, national media reported.
On the film “Bad Blood”, the jury said: “The theme of a poacher turned gamekeeper is an evergreen theme. But this riveting film by Vice News, narrating the personal guilt of a reformed rhino killer, was special: not least because such films come from Africa, but this was from the Indian border in Assam.”The other winning films are “Road to Fulfillment” (UAE) in the Transforming Society category, “Eating Our Way to Extinction” (UK) in the Documentary Impact category, “Changing Paradigms” (Henry Smith, Australia) in the Young Filmmaker category, and “Age of Change: Circulor” in the Digital Technology and AI for Sustainable Living category (UK).
The award presentation took place at this location at Merchant Taylors’ Hall onTuesday night.
The films we judged and awarded were undoubtedly inspirational but they also told fascinating stories that reflected both the threats, and crucially the solutions, to climate change and the extinction of animal and plant life up to how to create sustainable livelihoods, according to Nick Nuttall, the jury’s chair. The films, according to Nick, who is also a director and presenter of the digital broadcaster “We Don’t Have Time,” not only showed originality and quality, but also the reality that solutions to these many situations are already being implemented widely.
“We received 72 very high quality films from around the world for the tve GSFA 2022, and it was not an easy task for the Jury to first arrive at the 17 shortlisted films and eventually the 5 final category winners,” said Mei Sim Lai, chair of tve, in a statement on the occasion. The awarding of the tve GSFA 2022 Founder’s Award, a special nomination prize given to a movie that best addresses sustainability issues in a novel and creative way on the big screen, was one of the evening’s highlights.
Two movies received the Founder’s Award this year. For its skillful depiction of a crucial period in American history, “Call Jane” by Phyllis Nagy won the award for best full-length feature film. The film vividly depicts the troubled story of an American woman in the 1960s who had a life-threatening pregnancy that was legally impossible to end and how she connected with a clandestine group of women who were willing to take risks in order to perform abortions.
The Territory by director Alex Pritz, which vividly depicts the struggles of a young indigenous leader and his mentor who fight back in defence of their land and an uncontacted group living deep within the Amazon rainforest, won the Founder’s Award for documentary film.
“I am thrilled that we have two winning films from India this year,” remarked Surina Narula, the awards’ creator and president of tve, during the tve GSFA ceremony. The calibre of the films competing for these prizes is a source of great pride as it shows how successful we have been in increasing the number of organisations and people actively participating in the conversation on global sustainability over the past eleven years. The United Nations Environment Programme, WWF-UK, and Central Television (now a part of ITV) founded tve, a charity with UK registration, in 1984. Its goal is to use storytelling’s transformative power to ignite social change for a more sustainable future.