We’ve just published the Official Selection for our Solastalgia edition—check it out!
We’re beyond excited to share a lineup of wonderful, insightful, compassionate stories from all around the world. Stories of ecological grief, yes, but also stories of resilience, adaptation, and poetry in the face of environmental devastation.
As always, we’ve been floored by the amount of extraordinary non-fiction and anthropological storytelling that we received for our open call. Especially in times of such global unrest, it’s been strangely comforting to review and, thus, remind ourselves of the commonalities across human (and, in some cases, non-human) experience.
That said, we also had to make some difficult choices.
Despite organizing a virtual/hybrid edition this year, our festival program remains limited in size. In an ideal world, we could create a free sort of Netflix of anthropological filmmaking and viewers would consume everything with insatiable gusto. In the real world, we accept that most audiences have short attention span and that, at any given time, we’re competing for a bit of their attention with hundreds of other pieces of content.
This means we had to continue being strict in our festival selections. Our programming decisions were based not only on merit but also on available space and compatibility with the rest of the selection. We have tried, as much as possible, to prioritize anthropological works on the topic of solastalgia, but even so, we received a greater number of impressive works than we might be able to screen during this particular event.
All things considered, we’re extremely humbled and excited to share the chosen works with our audience. We’re also starting to think more about an anthro-Netlix or, at the very least, about organizing more anthro-screenings throughout the year with some of the other wonderful films we’ve received. If you have thoughts about this, drop us a line!
Make sure to follow our Facebook page for regular updates about the upcoming event.