“Pay the hell attention”: Watch 66 environmental films from around the world this weekend in Golden

Prin Uthaisangchai’s favorite part of documentary filmmaking is sleeping outside. The 13-year-old Thai filmmaker spent plenty of nights under the stars while tracking leatherback turtle hatchlings, the subject of his 11-minute short film, “The Story of the Leatherback.” It’s his first film, and it screens this week at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival.

“I just like being with nature, sleeping on the ground. I feel attuned to it,” he said.

Prin isn’t the youngest filmmaker in the festival — that title goes to his brother, Paran, at 11 years old. Paran’s film is about his search for the dugong, a manatee relative known as the “sea cow.” His favorite part of documentary filmmaking is meeting new people. His least favorite part is “synthesizing all of the research.”

The Colorado Environmental Film Festival premiered in Golden in 2006. Now in its 18th year, the festival has outgrown its home at the American Mountaineering Center and will move to the Green Center at the Colorado School of Mines. Accompanying 66 film screenings are panel discussions and an eco-expo showcasing local, environmental businesses and organizations. 

Around 30 filmmakers will fly in from around the world to attend their films’ screenings, including Prin and Paran, who will arrive Wednesday from Thailand.

“The community connection that you get sitting in a dark theater and watching something together is a really key element to this type of education,” said Nicole Bickford, executive director of the film festival. “People are absorbing information, but at the same time, they’re also engaging with audience members around them. That’s extremely valuable to both them and the filmmakers, because these aren’t entertainment-based films. They are films that have an educational component, and maybe a call to action.”

That doesn’t mean they’re not entertaining to watch — the festival organizers work hard to curate the films from a pool of about 300 — but the festival is ultimately about gathering, learning and talking through a common cause. 

“I do think there’s a place for film festivals like this where people have to shut off their phones and pay the hell attention to what’s going on here,” said Jan Haaken, a 76-year-old filmmaker whose documentary “Atomic Bamboozle” will be screened at the festival.

“I’m not so interested in an individual hero as much as how we do hard things together,” she added.

The movement of social movements

Haaken isn’t trying to persuade anyone that climate change is real. She’s not concerned with changing the minds of “hardcore deniers,” but she’s also wary of preaching to the choir, she said.

“I’m more interested in people who are genuinely struggling and uncertain,” Haaken said. “People who are thinking about getting involved, but don’t quite know how to understand a topic.”

Haaken is a psychologist and university professor by day, and has a tendency to make films about complex topics that have been oversimplified. She calls these areas “blind spots,” or specific points within social movement that need nuanced consideration. 

Her first film was a dive into the psychology of drag. Her second was about the corrosion of mental health and criminal justice. She’s made films about dairy farmers, women in war zones, abortion.

“All of my projects have come out of an area where there’s a lot of public anxiety,” Haaken said. “One effect of anxiety is people shut down some of their cognitive capacities to focus on what is immediate and often simple, like distinctions between good and bad, enemy and friend.”

“Atomic Bamboozle,” her latest film, looks at the way nuclear energy has been rebranded and marketed to younger, environmentally conscious audiences. The film screens at the festival Sunday.

Haaken has participated in decades of social movements — feminism, civil rights, reproductive rights, climate justice — and has watched those movements grow, fade and reemerge.

“How do we assess the defeats and victories of movements over time, particularly as new generations have forgotten about them?” Haaken asked. This is part of what interested her in nuclear energy. As a child growing up in the 1950s, she remembers hiding under her grade school desk during atomic bomb drills. 

“I realized (those drills) were like Santa Claus — just something adults told children,” Haaken said. “I guess I had a gut-level fear of nuclear energy that I think young people, it just doesn’t register in their gut the same way.”

But Haaken is hopeful in the way a 76-year-old gets to be, with a wide-angle view of social movements and generational differences.

“Young people are more savvy about propaganda than when I was growing up. They’ve been educated to know there are multiple points of view on a topic and that they’re being sold things right and left,” she said. “I think they are skeptical of these industries and more concerned about the climate crisis.” 

Prin and Paran, on the other hand, are hopeful in the way that 11- and 13-year-olds get to be, by focusing on what is directly in front of them — and what’s missing.

“My first ever (summer) camp was about sea turtles,” Prin said. “I got to see many species at the nursing center, like the green turtle, olive ridley or hawksbill. But I didn’t get to see a leatherback, which sparked my curiosity.”

When Prin started storyboarding his documentary three years ago, he envisioned a shot of the leatherback hatchlings crawling to sea for the first time. It would be the perfect happy ending, he thought. He set up visits to their hatching site, but the water had come in higher than usual that year — “the ice caps melted,” Prin said matter-of-factly — and most of the eggs rotted.

The next year scientists moved the nests to higher ground, but the sand up there was too soft and suffocated many of the baby turtles. 

Learning how to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, even with the help of scientists, was the hardest part of filmmaking for Prin. But he’s figuring it out. 

The long game

Since the festival’s inception audiences have become more familiar with niche environmental topics. More celebrities are attaching themselves to climate causes, Bickford said, and that star power has accelerated the way environmentalism makes its way into the film industry. 

Right now, the buzzword is “impact,” Bickford said. “They’re making ‘impact films.’ Filmmakers are even bringing on impact managers to help them push a call to action and measure how impactful their film is in driving change.”

But that impact takes time. Sometimes years, sometimes generations. 

“That’s a hard thing to accept when you know that the issues are pressing and that time is against us on so many of these things,” Bickford said. “The urgency is there, but not necessarily the capability to enact that change as fast as we want it to.”

But Prin and Paran aren’t deterred. Paran has shifted his focus to protecting seagrass meadows, a major habitat for the dugong, and Prin got permission from the Indian government to visit a protected breeding ground of the leatherback. He still hasn’t seen an adult in the wild.

“I’m going to make a small speech,” Prin said confidently toward the end of his interview with The Colorado Sun. “Maybe you could put it on the news as an ending.”

“Today might be a bad day when climate change wrecks our shorelines. When we live in a city full of dust, when endangered animals go extinct before our very eyes. But today is actually the best day when together we can stand up and help save these species and our planet, which is their home and our home. Thank you.”