Film Festival

The EcoMaties Environmental Film Festival brings you six entertaining documentaries, with one film being shown every Thursday for six weeks from 3 February to 10 March. The screenings take place on the picturesque lawn on the Rooiplein in the center of Stellenbosch University’s main campus. The films being screened are guaranteed to blow your mind (see more info and trailers for each film below). Screenings will start at 19h30, so its best to arrive around 19h00. The first 100 people will also get a free bag of popcorn so you don’t want to get there late.

All films are free for anyone to attend. This is a great way to spend your Thursday evening, so pack a picnic, bring a blanket, and invite your friends for some quality wallet-friendly entertainment. While you’re at it, invite your friends from Cape Town to let them see how great Stellenbosch is beyond the town on a Wednesday night.

This festival is organised in association with the SRC and UNASA, and is made possible by our friends at Pick n Pay.

The Cove

Oscar Winner for Best Documentary of 2009, The Cove follows an elite team of activists, filmmakers and freedivers as they embark on a covert mission to penetrate a remote and hidden cove in Taiji, Japan, shining a light on the town’s secretive dolphin slaughter. This film is a provocative mix of investigative journalism, eco-adventure and arresting imagery, adding up to an unforgettable story that has inspired audiences worldwide to action. This is one you don’t want to miss.

Flow

Flow is an award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century – The World Water Crisis. It builds a case against the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel. Flow also gives viewers a look at the people and institutions providing practical solutions to the water crisis and those developing new technologies, which are fast becoming blueprints for a successful global and economic turnaround.

Fresh

Fresh is a film that celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing the food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet.

Carbon Nation

Carbon Nation is a brand new documentary movie about climate change solutions. Even if you doubt the severity of the impact of climate change or just don’t buy it at all, this is still a compelling and relevant film that illustrates how SOLUTIONS to climate change also address other social, economic and national security issues. You’ll meet a host of entertaining and endearing characters along the way.

Bag It

Bag It is a documentary that follows “an average guy” as he starts to think about our addiction to plastic. He explores what happens to all of the single-use packaging we use after we through it away , a place he realises does not exist. This award-winning film is quirky, entertaining and more relevant than you think.

Manufactured Landscapes

Manufactured Landscapes is a striking documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. In the spirit of such environmentally enlightening sleeper-hits as An Inconvenient Truth, Manufactured Landscapes powerfully shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it, without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions.