reported by Tanner Shorer, CyberScreenwriter.com

When the ninth annual Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) opens at Ithaca College on March 30, it will offer 65 screenings and over 100 public events-more than twice as many offerings as last year.

"Running through April 6, this year's version of FLEFF will be a multimedia interarts extravaganza that reboots the environment and sustainability into a larger global conversation," says Patricia Zimmermann, codirector of the festival and professor of cinema and photography. "Our mission is to push our audiences to think differently about what the words 'environment' and 'sustainability' can mean in an interconnected global context. The festival embraces a wide range of issues not traditionally associated with either of these terms."

Among those issues are labor, war, health, disease, music, and intellectual property along with fine arts, software, remix culture, economics, archives, women's rights, human rights, and AIDS.

"This rethinking of sustainability demands a leap from conceiving of environment as confined to the materiality of the land, water, and air," says codirector and professor of politics Thomas Shevory. "We hope this festival will give our audiences the opportunity to experience the complex interrelations between the social, political, and artistic. After all, human cultures and the physical environments are deeply intertwined within one another."

The festival's offerings are organized around four programming streams: compost culture, contagion and contamination, war ecologies, and water/flows. Under those categories fall a host of presentations, ranging from media works from more than 30 countries to online digital artwork and musical performances in conjunction with the opening of "Counting." A commissioned outdoor community-built art installation project, "Counting" was conceived by Ithaca landscape artist Mary Zabell. Constructed from reconfigured show-fencing painted black, the installation provokes its audiences to consider the meaning of lives lost to such global tragedies as the AIDS crisis, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the recent Pakistani earthquake, and the South and Southeast Asian tsunami.

A pre-festival screening will be held on Monday, March 27, in Park Hall Auditorium. "Trafficking in the Archives" features a mix of archival film footage provided by the Smithsonian Institution, combined with a performance of well-known local musicians Mary Lorson and Saint Low.

The festival will also feature Jonathan Moller's "Refugees Even after Death: A Quest for Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation." Cosponsored by Amnesty International and on display in the Handwerker Gallery, this touring photography exhibit documents the exhumations of the bodies of Guatemalan civilians killed by the army during that country's civil war.

While most events will take place on campus, two dozen feature-length films-most of them in 35-mm format-will be screened at Cinemapolis and Fall Creek cinemas in downtown Ithaca as part of a partnership with the nonprofit 7th Art Corporation. The downtown screenings require an admission fee. The campus events are free and open to the public.

Launched in 1997 as an outreach project sponsored by Ithaca College, Cornell University's Center for the Environment and Eunadi Center for International Studies, and others, FLEFF has become a major regional event in upstate New York. In 2004 Ithaca College was the major sponsor and host. A year later the festival moved permanently to Ithaca College, where it is currently housed in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies.

Supported through a major collaboration between the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies and the Roy H. Park School of Communications, FLEFF is made possible in part by a grant from the Park Foundation. Support is also provided by several departments and areas across campus, the Experimental Television Center, the French Embassy, and French Ministry of Culture.

A complete list of topics, presenters, and events, along with a day-to-day calendar of events, is available at http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff.