How has cinema approached the theme of nature and the environment? And how has this relationship changed with the recent emergence of the environmentalist movement which has exploited cinema’s audiovisual capability to reach the general public about such compelling issues as global warming?
With the growing awareness that our world is at increased risk and that our lifestyles are impacting with ever greater devastation on the earth’s ecosystems, a new genre of the environmental film is garnering wider attention with works in which the distinction is blurring between fiction and documentary (once the traditional environmental film format).
The panel discussion will retrace the history of the relationship between cinema and the environment through the eyes of film critics and filmmakers and their works, from Flaherty’s documentaries filmed in the 1920s, to Avatar, from the evolution of the nature documentary to animated films on nature, to the relationship between cinema and ecology, and the most recent examples of disaster films.