International Wildlife Film Festival 2023

All Among the Bison

Duncan McDowall

Cody and Steve form an unlikely pair. Cody manages a herd of wild bison, and Steve leads individuals with physical and cognitive disabilities in outdoor recreation. When they met they asked themselves: what if we designed an adaptive bison viewing experience? For Cody and Steve, this is a natural association — one that sparks awe, humility, and faith that an inclusive and biodiverse future is possible.

All of Our Heartbeats are Connected Through Exploding Stars

Jennifer Rainsford

A staggering odyssey told as an essay on grief, and on how humans and nature rebuild after trauma. It moves from the shores of Japan where Sachiko, Yasu and Satoko try to find ways to accept their loss; via rarely seen places thousands of meters below the sea level where new life-forms thrive; to one of the Hawaiian islands where a group of volunteers gather to clean a beach from Japanese trash floating in from the Ocean.

Arctic Song (2022)

Germaine Arnattaujuq Neil Christopher Louise Flaherty

Arctic Song, by Inuit artist, storyteller, and filmmaker Germaine Arnattaujuq (Arnaktauyok) is inspired by Inuit myths from the Iglulik region in Nunavut: the raven who brings daylight to the world, the giants who turn into mountains, and the animals that create shimmering constellations and northern lights.

Batsies

Elizabeth Unger

BATSIES is a short, experimental doc that examines a woman's tender relationship with an animal that's quintessentially feared and loathed – the bat.
Our protagonists, Sara Weaver and Sarah Fritts, are best friends and high-level bat researchers at Texas State University. These ladies have a wicked sense of humor, they curse like sailors, they're covered in tattoos, and consider themselves outliers within a male-dominated field.
We follow their journey as they conduct cutting-edge bat research throughout rural Texas. Wind turbines are killing off bats at alarming rates, and Weaver and Fritts are working on the front lines to figure out why.
The scientific community understands just how critical this research is: Bats save billions of dollars in agriculture costs by consuming insects that feed on crops. Regardless of their economic value, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in deep public stigma towards bats that is now worse than ever.
We will interweave these ladies' research efforts, quirky friendship, and shared bat obsession throughout the film. BATSIES will serve a fresh take on saving a creature that's considered the ultimate outcast.

Beavers About Town

Yaz Ellis Jack Mifflin

The city of Vienna is home to over 230 beavers, including one special family: the stars of this film! We follow them as they navigate the urban world in which they have made their home. From living in an unexpected "lodge," to swimming past humans and using empty boats as places to relax, you've never seen beavers like this before.

Becoming Weightless (2021)

Miguel Anton

A steep and rocky gorge isn't an easy place in which to grow up. These kestrel fledglings still rely on their parents, but soon they will have to learn what it means to be a true kestrel: not fighting the wind, but becoming one with it.

Biocentrics

Fernanda Heinz Figueiredo Ataliba Benaim

Nature at the center—how does one design the world following natural principles and within its natural limits?
Biocentricos travels to different corners of the planet to reveal the origins and principles of biomimetics, a transdisciplinary methodology of design and technological innovation inspired by the natural world. Together with Janine Benyus, the leading expert in the field, we venture into the world of natural patterns and elaborate and elegant solutions that science can take as a model to address today's global challenges.

Biopixels

Kristina Dutton

Butterflies and moths comprise 12% of all species known to man (180,000 species!), and their seemingly endless biodiversity is visually translated on their wings through color and pattern variation. Incredibly, we humans share these specific wing shaping genes with butterflies, and actually these major molecular paintbrushes are found in numerous other creatures as well.
Shot at two cutting-edge research labs which specialize in the evolution of butterflies and moths, BIopixels is an animated short film exploring the world of evolutionary biology on the microscopic scale.
The images - rendered from collections containing over 50,000 specimens - were take by microscopists over three years to create the animated shorts Nanoscapes and Biopixels. Both the animation and the score play with concepts of pattern, time, density and other means of development common to biological evolution.

Born Curious (2022)

Julia de Guzman

J.R. Harris is an explorer, psychologist, and self proclaimed "curious dude." Always has been, always will be. Even now at "like, a hundred and twenty years old" he's not really a sit on the beach sipping margaritas kind of guy. He unwinds by getting WAY out there. Which is a little unusual for Queens kid from the projects, he knows. Filmed in J.R's beloved New York City, BORN CURIOUS explorers the life of the explorer. It is in turns comedic and lyrical, tense and heartwarming and will inspire even the most timid among us to live braver and bolder every day.

Bridging Fragments (2022)

Sonny DePasquale

Bridging Fragments explores the stressors in a tropical rainforest off the coast of Costa Rica, where the Sloth Conservation Foundation is helping the local wildlife navigate a disconnected world. Urbanization and deforestation are fracturing the wildlife corridors that preserve biodiversity in tropical rainforests, putting many species at risk, including the world's slowest mammal: the sloth.

Canada: Surviving the Wild North

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Canada is a vast country, covering almost ten million square kilometers. It has the largest intact forest on the planet, more than two million lakes and rivers and the longest coastline on Earth. This wild landscape is home to some of the world's most astonishing wildlife: polar bears, Arctic foxes, semipalmated sandpipers, coastal wolves, Pacific salmon, Canada lynx, southern flying squirrels, great grey owls, caribou, and harp seals.

Cool for You

Sherene Strausberg

"Cool For You", an animated film based on the book of the same title, explains global warming to children in a friendly way. Incorporating different characters and families, animals, and plants, children are introduced to CO2 and positive, easy ways to improve our impact on the earth.

Counting Cranes (2022)

Mariah Lundgren

Imagine trying to count hundreds of thousands of birds in a matter of seconds. This is what Andy Caven does every spring… from a plane. In March, almost a million sandhill cranes pass through Nebraska's Platte River Valley. For the past 20 years, the Crane Trust has conducted aerial surveys of sandhill crane roosts to get an accurate count of the number of birds that pass through. Andy and his team take us behind the scenes to show us how this is done, what they have learned, and why it's important.

Covenant of the Salmon People

Shane Thomas Anderson

Covenant of the Salmon People is a documentary portrait of the Nez Perce Tribe's ancient covenant with salmon. The film follows their efforts to uphold this ancient relationship as dams and climate impacts threaten one of the cornerstones of their culture.

Deep Rising

Matthieu Rytz

Matthieu Rytz returns to Sundance (Anote's Ark, 2018 Sundance Film Festival) with this up-to-the-minute tale of geopolitical, scientific, and corporate intrigue that exposes the machinations of a secretive organization empowered to greenlight massive extraction of metals from the deep seafloor that are deemed essential to the electric battery revolution.
Narrated by Jason Momoa, Deep Rising illuminates the vital relationship between the deep ocean and sustaining life on Earth. The documentary also follows mining startup The Metals Company, as it pursues funding, public favor, and permission from the International Seabed Authority to mine wide swathes of the Pacific Ocean floor.
Rytz's fly-on-the-wall access observes extraction companies as they co-opt scientific studies and deliver pitches to investors, proposing how the costs of industrializing our Earth's last pristine environment can be justified to access metals they claim will benefit all of mankind. As oil conglomerates pivot investments to deep-ocean mining, Deep Rising examines humanity's destructive pattern of extracting materials for profit and asks why we don't choose, instead, to develop abundant resources to solve our energy problems.

Drop (2021)

Liam Gallagher

Drop follows a single drop of water from its starting point atop the Continental Divide to its final destination in the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, meet individuals like fly-fishing guide Hilary Hutcheson, who has tracked the impact of global warming on Montana rivers for 20 years.

Earthbound: Nzambi Matee

Farhoud Meybodi

Amidst a catastrophic plastic waste crisis in her hometown of Nairobi, Nzambi Matee risks everything to pioneer revolutionary technology that transforms plastic waste into sustainable paving bricks.

Eco-Hack!

Josh Izenberg Brett Marty

A collection of biologists inventively save desert tortoises with a brilliant hack! (USA, 17 MIN)

ELEMENTAL, reimagining our relationship with wildfire

Trip Jennings

As fire seasons grow longer, more destructive, and more deadly, it's increasingly clear that our approach to reducing wildfire risk is failing. This film brings cutting-edge science and indigenous knowledge into focus. It forces all of us, from city dwellers to seasoned fire professionals to rural citizens, to question what we believe and offers a science-based way forward to live–and thrive–with fire.

Exposure (2022)

Holly Morris

An international group of women test their limits in completing one of the last attempted expeditions to the North Pole.

Fatal attractants (2023)

Alberton Middle School Students

This year, the Alberton, MT Middle School Project-Based Learning program elected to make a short bear documentary focused on their community's "Bear Aware" efforts. This film is the result of their efforts.

Finally I Sea (2022)

Alice Geary

Finally I Sea is the intimate story of a nine-year-old girl on a journey to see the sea for the very first time. Growing up in central London, Fajita has dreamt of a fun day at the seaside ever since she can remember, but barriers such as cost mean that she has never been able to escape the hustle and bustle of the city. Witness the pure emotions and reactions of Fajita and her friends as they finally get to experience a beautiful day on the coast.

Finding Salmon (2023)

Jeremy Monroe David Herasimtschuk

Follow 11-year-old Keyona into a wondrous world of trees, water, and friendly fish… and meet Salmon Watch, a program that connects Oregon youth to the river ecosystems right in their backyards.

Finding Solo (2022)

Myles Storey

Finding Solo follows Malaysian-born British filmmaker Myles Storey as he returns home in search of Solo, a white-handed gibbon believed to be the last of his kind in Bukit Serdang. With help from a primate photographer, local hikers, and Malaysia's leading gibbon expert, Myles tracks down Solo, witnessing the direct impact that human development has on wildlife.

FLIGHTPATH (2023)

David Grabias

Flightpath is a meditation on death and mourning, seen through the eyes of a wildlife researcher. When Sarah loses her boyfriend in a plane crash, she dives into a project studying bird mortality for a wind turbine company in the California desert. She comes to terms with her grief through her relationship with her tracking dogs as they catalog remains.

Gardening marine forests

Stefan Andrews

What if people could be the secret to transforming ocean deserts into rich forests filled with an abundance of life? In Korea, a hundred-year-old guild of female free divers use the latest techniques to manage kelp forests and pass that knowledge down to new generations.

Grounded (2023)

Jordan Hoffmaster

When a group of biologists in Western Montana discover their main study species is unintentionally being poisoned, they set out to find a solution and educate the public. Following raptor researchers from Raptor View Research Institute and MPG Ranch, Grounded explores the topic of lead poisoning in scavengers, particularly golden eagles, who feed on animals which were killed with lead bullets.

Heart of Maui (2022)

David Ehrenberg

This short National Park Service documentary film follows two biologists working to save rare and endemic forest birds in Haleakalā National Park.

Hope and Restoration: Saving the Whitebark Pine

Eric Liner

Whitebark pine trees are icons of North America's mountain landscape. They provide a host of ecosystem services and are considered a foundational and keystone species for the critical role they play in the places where they occur. They stand at the center of a web of life that supports dozens of plants and animals, including the grizzly bear, red squirrel, and Clark's nutcracker. Over the past several decades whitebark pine has experienced severe declines and today faces the very real threat of extinction.

Iridescent (2023)

Keith Ladzinski

When it comes to the discovery and documentation of birds, Tim Laman is one of the best in the world. As he entered the final curation stages of his forthcoming book, Bird Planet, fellow bird lover and National Geographic photographer Keith Ladzinski reached out with an opportunity to go on safari in one of the world's birding hotspots, Brazil's Pantanal region. It had been on Tim's bucket list for years but he had yet to visit, so he jumped at the chance to photograph some of South America's best birds.

Jawai (2023)

Katya Ignatiev

Hidden away in a corner of Rajasthan resides an ancient tribe. These humble, semi-nomadic people have lived in Jawai for hundreds of years, but the untold secret about this specific community is that they share their land with leopards and have found a way to honor the leopards while also continuing their traditional lifetime role as shepherds.

Kangaroo Valley (2022)

Kylie Stott

Kangaroo Valley is a coming-of-age story about a young kangaroo joey called Mala, chronicling the first year of her life.

Life in the Land: Amskapi Piikani

Lara Tomov

The Amskapi Piikani (People of the Blackfeet Nation) have interacted with every element of this landscape of what is today known as Montana, since time immemorial. Hear unique perspectives from Amskapi Piikani as they carry on the holistic approaches and reciprocal relationships that empower their community as they move into the future.

Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride

Pamela Gordon

This ground-breaking feature documentary chronicles The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride. Documented over the last 30 years by the BBC and other broadcasters around the world, this is the most extensively filmed pride of lions on Earth. The film spans decades, witnessing the lions' battle for survival in Kenya's famous Maasai Mara Reserve. This cinematic film is told entirely without narration, flawlessly edited, and underpinned by a stunning score by Samuel Sim.

Living with Snow Leopards: Dolma and Chodon

Gayle Podrabsky

Dolma and Chodon live with their families in the high mountain village of Kibber, India, population 450. Their families depend on their livestock to survive, and must find a peaceful coexistence with snow leopards. Through conservation efforts, these two women help both their community and the wildlife.

Loons: A Cry from the Mist

Julia Nunes

Race against the clock with biologists as they try to figure out why North American loons are suddenly in danger. Unlock the mysterious lives of these beloved birds, and ponder whether their cries will continue to be summer's soundtrack or go silent forever.

Nanoscapes

Kristina Dutton

Making the invisible, visible!
Images of butterfly wings at the microscopic scale are stunning, and at the nanoscopic scale they become otherworldly.
The colorful images in the animated short Nanoscapes were taken with light and electron microscopes at magnifications up to 50,000x. From iridescent blues to vivid greens, butterflies produce colors by modulating how light is reflected from their wings.
In other words, pigments are not the whole color story. Some color comes from intricate nano structures, and different organisms have evolved unique approaches to this phenomenon, called structural coloration. So a blue butterfly wing is not blue, but appears blue when tiny ridges bounce light in a way that adds together the amplitudes that make the wing appear blue.
What's more, the ultraviolet patterns on butterfly wings - invisible to the naked human eye - are among the most complex UV-reflecting structures in the animal kingdom.
The elaborate nanoscopic topography of butterfly wings has produced a wealth of data on how structural coloration works, and Nanoscapes is an artistic reimagining of exciting new research focused on how butterflies actually build these remarkable, infinitesimal landscapes.
Shot at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and the Martin Lab at George Washington University, a team of microscopists generated thousands of images over three years to create the animated shorts Nanoscapes and Biopixels. The score was created in advance of the animation, inspired by the material and conceptual layers of the project.

Night Owls (2022)

Sam Moore

Made in collaboration with Project Owlnet and the Maine Natural History Observatory, Night Owls follows migrating saw-whet owls as they are observed at a research station in Downeast Maine.

No Small Measure (2023)

Brett Kuxhausen

A Ghanaian Herpetologist is saving habitat, species, and improving the livelihoods of communities dependent on the mountainous forest ecosystem of the Togo-Volta Highlands

North Atlantic: The Dark Ocean

Ken O’Sullivan

Inspired by the spirit of adventure of early explorers like St Brendan the Navigator, Irish underwater cameraman Ken O'Sullivan voyages out into the open North Atlantic in search of the great sea monsters described in the explorers' early texts which may well have been large whales. Over the course of the film, such encounters reveal how enlightenment and awareness dispel the myths and damage of the darkness of our historic perceptions.

Path of the Panther

Eric Bendick

Using trap-motion cameras, wildlife photographer Carlton Ward charts the habitat of the elusive – and vanishing – Florida panther. Filmmaker Eric Bendick follows Ward and cohorts as they pursue the perfect photograph that they believe will change the tide of public indifference to government-sanctioned destruction of the Everglades' delicately balanced ecosystem and the panther's imminent extinction. Image-making has rarely felt this essential to our planet's survival.

PLACE – People, Lamprey, And Cultural Ecology

Jeremy Monroe David Herasimtschuk

Follow Umatilla Tribal Member Gabe Sheoships into an ancient cultural practice. Discover the connections between migratory fish, urban forests, and community stewardship, and witness the work one group is doing to re-build these connections for future generations.

Python Huntress (2023)

Nicholas Orris Matt Deblinger

A glimpse into the life of Donna Kalil, an environmentalist who spends her nights patrolling the Florida Everglades in search of the Burmese Python–an invasive apex predator that has devastated local wildlife. Learn about the problem with pythons and why for Donna, fulfilling her job responsibilities does not always come easy.

Range Rider (2022)

Colin Arisman

As wolves repopulate Washington State, conflict is heating up with rural ranching communities. Range rider Daniel Curry's job is to patrol wild areas on horseback, creating a buffer between wolves and the cattle herds that graze on public lands. When these wild carnivores are suspected of killing livestock, the consequences for packs can be fatal. As illegal poaching and state sponsored kills take their toll, can Daniel prove that coexistence between ranchers and wolves is possible?

Remembering Sudan: The Last Male Northern White Rhino

Ami Vitale

Sudan was someone Zacharia Mutai spent years with, someone he knew better than his own children, someone he loved. Sudan's death was tragic, but not a surprise. Zacharia, the head rhino caregiver at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in northern Kenya, was caring for one of the last remaining northern white rhinos on the planet. But this is not just the story of Zacharia's loss or of the death of a rhino. This is the story of the death of a species. A loss of such magnitude is a loss for all of humanity. Without these creatures, we suffer more than just the loss of ecosystem health. We suffer a loss of imagination, a loss of wonder, a loss of beautiful possibilities.

Rooted: A Hard Nut to Crack

Barend van der Watt

In the dark recesses of the Peruvian rainforest stands a titanic Brazil nut tree. For it to reproduce, this awe-inspiring pillar of strength relies on a series of intricate relationships with animals and insects found only in the wild.

Sagebrush Gold (2022)

Marcus Widger

A lithium mine being built in Nevada's remote sagebrush desert promises us a greener future, but local ranchers, environmentalists, and indigenous tribes share a different side to the story.

Secrets of The Elephants: DESERT & RAINFOREST

James Cameron Maria Wilhelm Lucinda Axelsson Pamela Caragol Dr. Paula Kahumbu

Elephants are powerful, loving and wise, but we are only starting to unlock their deepest secrets. The award-winning natural history series Secrets of… returns with its next installment, Secrets of the Elephants. The series travels the world—from the Savannahs of Africa to the urban landscapes of Asia—to discover the strategic thinking, complex emotions and sophisticated language of elephants, shaping a unique and dynamic culture. Narrated by Natalie Portman and featuring renowned National Geographic Explorer and elephant expert Dr. Paula Kahumbu, Secrets of the Elephants will change everything you thought you knew about elephants forever.

Secrets of the Sea (2022)

Howard Hall Jonathan Bird

From adorable pygmy seahorses and opalescent squids to manta rays, tiger sharks, barnacle blennies, a coconut octopus, and much more, Secrets of the Sea brings you face-to-face with an astonishing array of marine critters and shows the fascinating ways they interact with each other and their environment. Many aquatic animals depend on one another for survival, and Secrets of the Sea demonstrates the critical importance of biodiversity to keeping our oceans healthy.

Serengeti (2022)

Michael Dalton

The Serengeti is home to many of Africa's iconic animals, and hosts one of the world's most extraordinary natural events: the annual wildebeest migration. Nature has orchestrated a symphony in which every species has a very distinct role to play in the balance of an entire ecosystem.

Sound of the Lake (2022)

Cale Green Johnny Holder Daphne Wong

During the Jackson Wild summit in 2022, talented young teams made films about the scientific work being done here in the Nationalpark Neusiedler See-Seewinkel in Austria. This is one of those films. Listen to the sounds of the lake.

sym•bee•o•sis

Neil Losin

In sym-bee-o-sis, scientists discover that the alliance between bees and plants depends on an unexpected third partner: microbes! But the chemicals we use in agriculture are putting this ancient partnership at risk.

The Backyard Bears

Riley Edward McClaughry

This film snapshots the human-wildlife conflicts that black bears experience as humans continue to encroach on their habitat: Lake Tahoe, CA.

The Blackfoot Challenge

Jeremy Roberts

Nearly three decades has gone into creating a conservation anomaly in western Montana. The Blackfoot Challenge is a national model of creating working landscapes that emphasize conservation and co-existence. This short films tells their story and provides a recipe for hope in our divided country.

The Ghost Rainforest

John Davies

Told from the perspective of activist Narubia Werreria, The Ghost Rainforest follows a group of five indigenous leaders and activists from the Amazon as they make a once-in-a-lifetime journey to a little-known temperate rainforest on the West Coast of Scotland. This visit is set amidst the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, capturing a moment in history when the world needed to listen to indigenous activists, the "guardians of the forests." This film focuses on the importance of indigenous wisdom to protect these habitats before it's too late.

The Giant Bears of Alaska

Jürgen Hansen Simone Stripp

Bears in Alaska are struggling to adapt to a changing environment. The world's largest brown bears on Kodiak Island depend upon the abundance and diversity of wild salmon, but climate change is disrupting an equilibrium that has existed for thousands of years.

The Loco-Motion Picture

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Over billions of years, evolution has created many ways for living beings to move from one place to another. Explore the many different types of locomotion–all the specific squirms, squiggles, wiggles, and slides in the animal kingdom.

Wild Hope: The Beautiful Undammed

Andy Maser Ben Hamilton

Ten years after the largest dam removal in history, scientists on the Elwha River in Washington are chronicling an inspiring story of ecological rebirth. Recovering salmon populations are transferring critical nutrients from the ocean into the forests along the Elwha's banks, enriching the entire ecosystem. The Elwha's revival is encouraging advocates to push for the removal of many larger dams in the region.

Wild Life (2023)

Chai Vasarhelyi Jimmy Chin

A sweeping portrait of conservationists Kris and Doug Tompkins chronicling their fight to preserve one of the last truly wild places on earth.

Geographies of Solitude

Jacquelyn Mills

Two women on a lonely island off the coast of Nova Scotia: Sable Island. Conservationist Zoe Lucas was an art student when she came there for the first time in the 1970s and has been living on this remote strip of land for decades now, mostly alone. Director Jacquelyn Mills films Lucas on her daily trips around the island to observe the local flora and fauna. Her studies of Sable Island's population of wild horses, for which the island is famous, and of the biodiversity there in general have made the self-taught scientist an esteemed expert. Collecting the alarming amounts of plastic washing up also forms part of Lucas's everyday life. Mills films on 16 mm, which lends a special beauty to the barren landscape. Science and art fuse in the two women's activities, each enriching the other. The movements of beetles are made into music. Horse manure provides useful data for Lucas and is just as useful for Mills's experiments in film exposure and developing, along with algae and other vegetation. When Mills loads the final film reel into her camera, it is not just the shoot that is coming to an end, but also a special encounter between two people. A twinge of melancholy is unavoidable.