The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
3 film offerings range from EFFY to LOL
Environmental Film Fest celebrates 10 years
Before the indoor pursuits of March and early April turn to outdoor activities in May, a busy time looms in the visual arts. Consider three intriguing film offerings at Yale University this coming week — from EFFY to sperm donor to LOL. Allow us to explain.
⏩ EFFY is the Environmental Film Festival at Yale, celebrating its 10-year anniversary with a screening of “An Inconvenient Sequel” Wednesday and other films through Saturday.
The film fest, which draws viewers from throughout the area for its free screenings, is sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and is one of the country’s top student-run environmental film festivals, according to organizers.
Important environmental topics are covered in the films, says Eric Desatnik, founder of EFFY, but “there’s a larger vision for the Environmental Film Festival at Yale which perhaps is even more relevant today than when I founded it 10 years ago. At a more macro level, what these films do is showcase how regular people can meaningfully influence the public discourse and shape our future for the better.
“Today, change-making is no longer only within the purview of government agencies, corporations or
wealthy philanthropists, but you and I now have the tools and the platform to change our world in ways that were unimaginable even 10 years ago,” Desatnik says. “These films represent that notion and hopefully can continue to inspire advocacy and action across a number of areas including but not confined to environmental issues.”
Opening night also features speakers Jon Shenk, director of “An Inconvenient Sequel”; Desatnik; and Flo Stone, founder of Washington’s version of the film fest (DCEFF), and will take place at Kroon Hall starting at 8 p.m.
Thursday the action moves to the Whitney Humanities Center at 7:30 p.m. for a screening of “Containment.” Friday at 1 p.m. will see a student film showcase in Luce Hall. At 7:30 p.m. in Whitney Humanities Center will be a screening of the film “Beyond Standing Rock” and a panel with director Brian Malone and Nina Gualinga, a speaker from the Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean Conference.
The public portion of a busy slate Saturday begins at 3 p.m. in Evans Hall with a screening of “Chasing Coral,” then the film “One Strange Rock” by National Geographic (featuring discussion with Yale astrophysics professor Sarbani Basu) at 5:30 p.m. and the film “Wasted!” at 7:30 before an awards ceremony and closing at 9:30.
Thank you for coming
⏩ One woman’s search for her genealogy is at the center of the slyly titled “Thank You For Coming,” produced by Keith Ochwat and focused on director and protagonist Sara Lamm’s journey to find her biological father at age 29 after finding out she was sperm donor-conceived.
In an email, Ochwat said the film premiered to a packed theater at the LA Film Festival and has played at the DOC NYC Film Fest. The free and open-to-the-public screening will take place at Sterling Hall of Medicine’s Harkness Auditorium at 7 p.m. Wednesday with Lamm in attendance.
“We’ve been receiving fantastic feedback about our film’s candid, heartfelt and humorous look at the issues we explore,” Ochwat writes.
Oh, and also attending will be Lamm’s “scientific father” (her donor), who will be flying up from South Carolina. A lively discussion will follow. You can RSVP for the screening at thankyouforcomingmovie.com/yale. Sterling Hall is at 333 Cedar St.
Foreign films riff on U.S., Bollywood
⏩ The third film slate at Yale, “LOL” for short, stands not for “laugh out loud” (thankfully) but “Letters of Love: From the Middle East to South Asia,” sporting contemporary genre comedies on Tuesdays at 6:15 p.m. for three weeks. The films are from Morocco, Egypt and Turkey.
Free and open to the public, the opener this Tuesday in Luce Hall (34 Hillhouse Ave.) is “Road to Kabul” (Brahim Chkiri, 2012), a Moroccan stoner comedy/road movie, according to an LOL release, that riffs on a long history of the U.S. presence in the Middle East, between Hollywood and the War on Terror.
The South Asia Studies Council at the MacMillan Center at Yale will host the three-film series, curated by visiting film historian Samhita Sunya.
April 10 brings the 2016 Turkish gangster comedy “Bir Baba Hindu,” wherein the son of a mob boss takes up yoga and meditation to deal with the stress of a life of crime. He falls in love with the yoga instructor, who is kidnapped and
turns out to be the daughter of a Mumbai gangster. (A big Bollywood musical number just might close the film, we hear.)
The April 17 finale is Egyptian hit film “Gahim Fel Hend/Hell in India” (Moataz Eltony, 2016), an
exuberant musical heist comedy, says Sunya, that also heavily draws on the musical and dance idioms of Bollywood. It, too, includes a kidnapping.