Check Out Past CEFF Films
Explore our collection of the 2022 festival films now available for streaming and click on titles for descriptions. Titles in green indicate films featured in the CEFF 4 Kids screening, and titles with a $ indicate films available to rent.
A Food Story: The Regenerative Rancher (2022)
PLAY NOW (6 minutes)
The future of the land, the animals, and the soil is a vital conversation that we need to keep having in the most thorough way possible. So the team at MarketPlace, headed out to Green Pastures Farm to immerse themselves in the world of Greg and Jan Judy, regenerative ranchers.
Directed by: Crystal Buckey Brown
A Monolithic Folly: Fracking Colorado's North Fork Valley (2022)
PLAY NOW (28 minutes)
One Colorado community figured out how to rebuild its identity when the coal industry collapsed. Now oil and gas is knocking on the door, and that may put a healthy agricultural economy at risk.
Directed by: Chad J. Reich
A River Reborn (2022)
PLAY NOW (28 minutes)
The Little Conemaugh River winds through Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains carrying the toxic legacy of a century of industry pollution. Empty of life for generations, its rebirth signals a new era for coal country and those who have depended on it.
Directed by: Ben Kalina
A Task of Cosmic Importance (2022)
PLAY NOW (2 minutes)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
An inspiring treatise on why the Earth is worth saving and why we have to do it now.
Directed by: Brian Emerson
Animals Habitat (2022)
PLAY NOW (1 minute)
Various wild animals are tragically losing their habitat caused by massive environmental destruction. This stop motion animation shall intensify the awareness of species and their habitat and the urgency to preserve it.
Directed by: James Smith
Bird's Eye View (2022)
Bird’s Eye View is an art-science exploration of interspecies friendship between youth and birds for a survivable future that is looking up. This film integrates their embodied movement with science, words, puppets, and music from the imaginations of Boulder’s youth.
Directed by: Beth Osnes
Brave New World (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
Brave New World is about climate change. What the film has to say is that while we might think we live in a beautiful new world, if we open our eyes, we are confronted with the fact that this world is destroying its environment. It is time to act.
Directed by: Zoltán Bendegúz Szabó
Breaking: Shocking leaked internal ExxonMobil holiday video (2022)
A fake internal Christmas update from ExxonMobil to shareholders. Their CEO gleefully lists the facts about their terrible climate record and efforts to greenwash their image while guaranteeing to maximize profits and willfully disregard the safety and security of the entire planet.
Directed by: Harold Moss
Change is Coming (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
The music video deals with the anxiety caused by the climate change, especially from the perspective of a child. In the video parents in their environmentally unsustainable everyday actions suddenly notice their children disappear from their side.
Directed by: Klaus Welp
Cicada Time (2022)
A new father returns to his native Princeton with his infant daughter to experience the Brood X cicadas of his youth. In the process, he discovers a novel way to measure the passage of time.
Directed by: Eli Matthew Obus
Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops (Part 1: Introduction) (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
The Earth is warming the Earth. In this series of five short films, learn why natural warming loops have scientists alarmed—and why we have less time than we think.
Directed by: Susan Gray
Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops (Part 2: Forests) (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
The world’s forests are responsible for removing a quarter of all human carbon emissions from the atmosphere and are essential for cooling the planet. But that fraction is shrinking as the three major forests of the world—tropical, boreal, and temperate—succumb to the effects of climate feedback loops. The resulting tree dieback threatens to tip forests from net carbon absorbers to net carbon emitters, heating rather than cooling the planet.
Directed by: Susan Gray
Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops (Part 3: Permafrost) (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
Permafrost, an icy expanse of frozen ground covering one-quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, is thawing. As it does, microscopic animals are waking up and feeding on the previously frozen carbon stored in plant and animal remains, releasing heat-trapping gases as a byproduct. These gases warm the atmosphere further, melting more permafrost in a dangerous feedback loop. With permafrost containing twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, its thaw could release 150 billion tons of carbon by the end of the century.
Directed by: Susan Gray
Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops (Part 4: Atmosphere) (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
Global warming is altering Earth’s weather patterns dramatically. A warmer atmosphere absorbs more water vapor, which in turn traps more heat and warms the planet further in an accelerating feedback loop. Climate change is also disrupting the jet stream, triggering a feedback loop that brings warm air northward, and causes weather patterns to stall in place for longer.
Directed by: Susan Gray
Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops (Part 5: Albedo) (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
The reflectivity of snow and ice at the poles, known as the albedo effect, is one of Earth’s most important cooling mechanisms. But global warming has reduced this reflectivity drastically, setting off a dangerous warming loop: as more Arctic ice and snow melt, the albedo effect decreases, warming the Arctic further, and melting more ice and snow. The volume of Arctic ice has already shrunk 75% In the past 40 years, and scientists predict that the Arctic Ocean will be completely ice-free during the summer months by the end of the century.
Directed by: Susan Gray
Climate for Change: Closing the Loop (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
This is a film about the concept of the Circular Economy and how it can potentially help the world’s environment. The profiles are chosen to show that people from all walks of life can make a difference if they are motivated.
Directed by: Andrew Paterson, Shahul Hameed
Code Red: My Southwest Overflight (2022)
An aerial photographer/musician encountered drought, fires, and a record-breaking heat wave in the 4 corners area of the Southwest. My flight turned into rude awakening of severe flight conditions, while I observed the Code Red changing landscape below.
Directed by: Craig Peyton
Cracked (2022)
A little girl tries her best to help nature in a drought-stricken village. A story of an 8-year-old girl that shows us individually what we can do about the climate crisis.
Directed by: MAHMUT TAŞ
Eyes (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
A short look into a community of people that join together at night in the meatpacking district of downtown Los Angeles. Often displayed as radical and violently preachy, Eyes captures the true nature of activists and animal lovers.
Directed by: Zachary Goodwin, Flynn Harris, Alex Flanagan, Alex Kumph
Fast Fashion Is Hot Garbage | Climate Town (2022)
Comedian and climate science and policy graduate student Rollie Williams does a punishingly-researched deep dive on fast fashion. It’s a comedy, but it’s also an alarming look at overconsumption and the avenues we have available to us for solving it.
Directed by: Rollie Williams
If You Give a Beach a Bottle (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
Inspired by a picture book, Max Romey heads to a remote beach on Alaska’s coastline in search of marine debris. What he finds is a different story altogether.
Directed by: Max Romey
Keystone: Voices for the Little Fish (2022)
The people of Gardiner, Maine work to provide fish passage around three historic dams on Cobbossee Stream for the first time in 270 years. The goal: restore an ecosystem that can support millions of river herring and other wildlife.
Directed by: Jerry Monkman
Lynx: Shadows of the Forest (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
20 years after Colorado Parks and Wildlife reintroduced lynx, state biologists collaborate with forest managers to ensure a sustained future for the elusive and secretive species.
Directed by: Sean Ender
Making a Living and a Life; Empowering young people with an ALL Careers approach (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
The ALL Careers approach is an effort to make explicit connections between environmental knowledge/concern and ALL careers (not just the small segment of the economy made up of “environmental careers” as presently understood).
Directed by: Ethan B McAleavy
Mapping Survival (2022)
PLAY NOW (30 minutes)
Winner of 2022 CEFF Best Short Film Award
This is the story of how a nomad in Chad, while advocating for the rights of her community, has become a leader in the fight against climate change and a voice for Indigenous people across the planet.
Directed by: Nacho Corbella
Maui Ocean Center Virtual Huakaʻi (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
This virtual huakaʻi to Maui Ocean Center in maʻalaea, Maui explores the importance of coral reefs and the threats that they face. Students share about how we can help protect coral reefs.
Directed by: Sachiko Pierner, Jaston Patao, Anuhea Vida
My Journey Across the Ocean (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
My animated short film is about my journey crossing the Atlantic Ocean with my family on a small sailboat when I was 15 years old and how I discovered that virtually anywhere you go on this planet, chances are that trash has gotten there first.
Directed by: Madeleine Kelly Toomey
Painting the Apocalypse with Bob Ross (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
In this parody of the popular 1980-90’s series “The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross”, Bob Ross takes the audience on an artistic journey exploring the many impacts humans are having on our natural landscapes. This film was created by three Maui students as part of Maui Huliau Foundation’s Huliau Environmental Filmmaking Club during the 2020-21 school year.
Directed by: Katherine Salomon, Harley Strain, Marlee Whyte
Plastic Bags? No Thanks! (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
The movie discusses environmental issues caused by the use of plastic bags and the simple solution: carry your own bag. We hope the movie inspires people to carry their own reusable bag.
Directed by: Aarya Naringrekar
Plastic Crisis: Our Oceans In Peril (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
There’s a company destroying our oceans. And you and I have a unique power to stop them.
Directed by: Shannon Germaine
Rescuing Our Reefs (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
Coral reefs are essential to the ocean’s health, and they are quickly dying. Luckily, coral farming gives reefs a chance to recover. However, we must take action against the underlying issue of Climate Change if we truly want to preserve these underwater ecosystems.
Directed by: Jessica Bukowski
Saving Beauty: Learning to Live with the Rare Ones Among Us (2022)
New Mexico State botanist has taken up the challenge to engage city government, landowners, schools, and the community of Santa Rosa in conserving unique wetlands and endangered plants as part of the natural heritage and future tourism of the community.
Directed by: Christina Selby, Arturo Anzures
Saving Juliette (2022)
Suspicious of abnormally high cancer rates, a small town in Georgia investigates and then fights the state’s largest power company for access to clean water. This is a story that questions personal politics, explores the lasting legacy of environmental policy, and shows just how powerful a community’s voice can be.
Directed by: Evey Wilson Wetherbee
Saving Water with Aquaponics (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
I had heard of aquaponics before I made this system, but I did not know how effective they were. Once I learned how helpful they could be in mitigating droughts, I decided to make one for myself.
Directed by: Benjamin Becker
Sea Creatures Strike Back (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
In this news broadcast parody, various sea creatures “strike back” against humans by subjecting them to the same problems that humans cause in the marine environment.
Directed by: Kiana Haugg, Katherine Salomon, Bianca Haugg, Malakai Karaca, Isabella Salamone, Syden Smith
Seals and Sea Lions: Scoundrels or Scapegoats? (2022)
Call for culls of seals and sea lions in Canada are increasing. Fishermen believe that culls or increased ‘harvests’ of these marine mammals will help fish stocks recover. Are these marine mammals scoundrels or scapegoats in the fight to save fisheries?
Directed by: Mike Sullivan
Seas Of Trees Mini-Documentary (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
I am the President’s Environmental Youth Award winner for 2021 through the EPA for my non-profit Seas Of Trees. Seas Of Trees is a tree-planting non-profit rooted in Telluride Colorado with the mission to plant as many trees as possible with as many youth as we can!
Directed by: Cedar Palmer
Soil care is climate repair (2022)
PLAY NOW (4 minutes)
Winner of 2022 CEFF Best Youth Film Award
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
Our film shows the 5 principles of soil health, and explains how soil can sequester carbon which leads to solving climate change.
Directed by: Alex Jin Hai huang Hanna, Adrian Jin long huang Hanna, Athena Jin lu huang Hanna
Spiraling Crisis: the Alarming Convergence of Climate Change and Pandemics -- A Postcard from the Future (2022)
An examination of the convergence of climate change and pandemics through the eyes of a variety of research scientists.
Directed by: Jay M. Fidell
The Beast of Our Time: Climate Change & Grizzly Bears (2022)
The 28-minute documentary is an unflinching inquiry into the relationship between climate change and grizzly bears. Film explores the relationship between grizzlies and climate change. Narrated by Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges and scored by Bill Payne of Little Feat.
Directed by: Maaike Middleton
The Falconer (2022) - $
The Falconer is a documentary feature that captures beauty and hope. This is a story of second chances: for injured birds of prey, for an abandoned plot of land, for a group of teenagers who have dropped out of high school, and for Rodney himself.
Directed by: Annie Kaempfer
The Homo Sapien Virus (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
Earth is very sick. It can’t breathe. It is balding fast. It has an increasingly high fever. Earth must go to the doctor to see what is causing this illness.
Directed by: Andrew Wang
The Last Last Hike (2022)
83-year-old Nimblewill Nomad is about to become the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. Throughout his odyssey, he’s meeting hikers along the way and sharing the magic of Flagg Mountain, where he has been the caretaker for the past three years. With more than two decades and 50,000 miles of hiking experience behind him, will this really be his last last hike?
Directed by: Céline François
The Ripple (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
The Ripple takes viewers on a circular journey to understand environmental justice and the power we hold in our hands.
Directed by: Shannon Germaine
The Shadow Of Gold (2022) - $
From communities threatened by mining projects to small-time artisanal miners risking their lives in countries like Congo, Peru and China, THE SHADOW OF GOLD leads viewers from flashpoints of extraction, through loosely regulated supply networks, to the very top of the global gold supply chain.
Directed by: Denis Delestrac, Robert Lang, Sally Blake
Water: Not a Drop to Waste (2022)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
Water: A precious, limited natural resource that we’ve taken for granted for centuries. It’s time we examine where it comes from, the costs to extract, how we use or waste it, and what the consequences are; before it’s too late.
Directed by: Rishub Madhav, Krishna Madhav
We Trees (2022)
PLAY NOW (3 minutes)
Ever wonder what trees think of us know that we’ve created a climate disaster?
Directed by: Sam Kauffmann
We've Only Got This World (2022)
PLAY NOW (77 minutes)
The climate crisis is causing much damage to Vanuatu, The Pacific and the rest of the world. Filmed in 2019, “Wol ia nomo” is Wan Smolbags response to the devastating effects we are seeing and a call to arms to do something about it.
Directed by: Peter Walker
Where There Once Was Water (2022) - $
RENT NOW (74 minutes)
A song for the sacred in all of us. An invitation to change our perspective, rewrite the story, and heal our relationship with water … one watershed, one meal, one raindrop, at a time. Water is love, and if we write it together, this love story may indeed become one for the ages.
Directed by: Brittany App
Wildlife in Our Backyard (2022)
PLAY NOW (7 minutes)
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
It is often said that we must tolerate wildlife, but what happens if we learn to thrive with them instead? What can this mean for the wildlife? What can it mean for the people of Florida? And what can it mean for the endangered Florida panther? Wildlife in Our Backyard shows us some of the problems facing the wildlife as well as the hope of a brighter future as we learn to share the landscape with them.
Directed by: William Freund
Yoshino Ringyo: The Lumberjacks of Japan (2022) - $
RENT NOW (20 minutes)
Japan has one of the oldest traditions of forestry in the world. Now facing massive decline, the foresters of this region are struggling to hold on.
Directed by: David Caprara
YOUTH v GOV (2022) - $
RENT NOW (107 minutes)
Winner of 2022 CEFF Best of the Fest Award
Featured in 2022 CEFF 4 Kids Screening
YOUTH v GOV follows 21 young Americans suing the world’s most powerful government to protect their constitutional rights to a stable climate. If they win, they will change the future.
Directed by: Christi Cooper