Last month I explained the three types of film festivals: identity festivals, which focus on ethnic, religious, racial, and gender identities, genre festivals, which look at particular kinds of movies and generic film festivals. There’s a fourth kind: Advocacy film festivals. The latest addition to the Bay Area pantheon, the Green Film Festival, falls into that category. This is clearly the festival for people who will take public transportation or their bikes to the theater, leaving their Priuses as home. (Full disclosure: I’m one of those people.)
Suzan Beraza’s documentary Bag It, about plastic bags and the damage they do, will launch the festival on March 3rd. It will close March 6 with The Man Who Stopped the Desert. The one filmmaker involved you’ve probably heard of is Werner Herzog. He’s taken Dmitry Vasyukov’s four-hour television documentary, Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, and condensed it to 96 minutes.
As near as I can tell, all the films to be screened will be documentaries. Maybe it’s a genre festival, after all.
The Green Film Festival will take place at the Embarcadero Center Cinema. That makes a lot of sense. It’s one of the easiest locations in the Bay Area to get to by public transportation.
Bayflicks 