Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Family Friendly, Michigan Premiere, World Premiere, Representative in Attendance
Kendsie and Matt have been living car-free forever, and now they’ve added two kids to the mix without losing any of their optimism. The filmmaker knew she had to capture the joy it’s brought her family and so many others along the way.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly
Scattered around the shores of the Great Lakes are unique ridge and swale ecosystems, created over thousands of years and home to many rare species. Researcher Steve Loheide wants to know what’s happening beneath these landscapes - how shifting Great Lakes water levels ripple underground, and what that could mean for this fragile ecosystem’s future.
Subject in Attendance, Michigan Premiere
The rapidly changing climate weighs heavily on Andrea, a sensitive and passionate professor who has taught climate science for over 20 years. She knows she can’t navigate these feelings alone. The film follows participants in the Good Grief Network, an innovative support program, as they lean into their painful feelings and, in the process, discover joy, connection, and a renewed sense of possibility.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly
A group of high school students at a boarding school in Northern Michigan set out to make a film about regenerative farming, only to get tangled in the contradictions between what they learn and the system that feeds them.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Michigan Premiere, First Time Filmmaker, Nudity, Staff Pick
Part nature documentary, part queer love letter to community and action, Neon Reef immerses you in the sun-drenched, surreal beauty of Miami’s underwater world. Dive past the waves that break on the pulsing neon shores of America’s glitziest beach town with this unlikely reef warrior couple as they dive, strategize, schmooze politicians, and rally a diverse community to defend the coral reef at their doorstep.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly, Representative in Attendance, Student Filmmaker
_Organic Network _features interviews from urban farmers and experts in Flint, Michigan on the impact of the water crisis, COVID, benefits of local farming, and how the lives of the farmers have changed over the years.
Has Subtitles, Family Friendly, Michigan Premiere, Staff Pick
Plant Life captures Dr. Joanne Chory at a pivotal moment: as her Parkinson’s advances and carbon levels surge, she pursues her most audacious experiment yet. Having revolutionized plant biology once already, she and her team are re-engineering crops to draw down carbon dioxide at planetary scale — a scientific race against time that may determine both her legacy and our future.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Family Friendly, Representative in Attendance, Staff Pick
In Michigan’s Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, teams from around the world compete in the MATE International ROV Competition. In this competition, the Thomson family from Alpena competes brother against sister against sister against father. Who will triumph in this test of engineering skills in the Great Lakes?
Michigan Premiere, Staff Pick
The last commercial fishermen of the Great Lakes struggle to survive as they face unprecedented ecological disasters, a changing climate, and outdated governmental regulations.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Michigan Premiere
Lake Michigan’s Green Bay is the world’s largest freshwater estuary, where the warm, nutrient-rich water of the Lower Fox River mixes with the cool water of the lake, creating an aquatic environment that supports a productive fishery, wetlands and a migratory flyway. The film turns to the people who care for this world of fish and birds as they seek understanding and look for solutions.
Filmmaker in Attendance, First Time Filmmaker
Water is Life covers issues facing the Great Lakes in brief yet explains how people around the region are doing something when it comes to the challenges they face. This is a synopsis of the longer documentary still in production.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly
For four decades, volunteers with the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology have visited Wisconsin’s Baraboo Hills before dawn, gently netting and banding birds one by one. Year after year, the data adds up to something bigger - a long-term window into how bird populations are shifting across the country.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Family Friendly, Michigan Premiere, First Time Filmmaker
Across the salt-sprayed shores of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, a gathering of Indigenous women comes together to rematriate wampum as a living system of justice, truth, and inherent relationship. Through practices of teaching, making, and collective remembrance, the film examines how patriarchal disruption, colonial extraction, and climate-driven coastal change threaten not only living shores but the relationships that sustain them.