Wild & Scenic Film Festival

The 2023 Wild & Scenic Film Festival is in the books! Stay tuned for details about next year!

Ohio River Foundation (ORF) will again bring one of the largest environmental film festivals in North America to Cincinnati this spring. The Wild & Scenic Film Festival took place on Friday, April 21 at the Woodward Theater in Over-the-Rhine.

The Festival was started by the watershed advocacy group, the South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL) in 2003. The home festival kicks off the international tour to communities around the globe, allowing SYRCL to share their success as an environmental group with other organizations. The goal of the festival is to inspire environmental activism and a love for nature through film.

2023 Wild & Scenic Film Festival Trailer

2023 Featured Films

I Am Salmon – Connecting humanity with salmon and the sea through the subtle art of poetry and Gyotaku (fish rubbing), Duncan Berry shares his experience as a longtime environmentalist and former captain of a salmon troller. In adopting the perspective of this transcendent fish, the beauty and power of the Oregon coast becomes the canvas through which the evolution of the salmon is illustrated.

A Flyfishing Refugee – A Polish dissident discovers the true reason rivers and salmon figure so prominently in his life.

Endangered Migration: A Monarch Butterfly Story – The annual monarch butterfly migration to Mexico is at risk, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has listed monarchs as an endangered species. Together, local communities and World Wildlife Fund have made significant progress toward protecting monarch butterflies’ habitat in the alpine forests that the butterflies migrate to each winter. People living in the U.S. and Canada have the opportunity to help support monarch butterflies throughout the other stages of the insects’ life cycles by preserving habitats and food sources like milkweed here in our own countries.

The Rock Pool Waltz – The Rock Pool Waltz centers around a boy’s affinity with nature which helps to ease his worries and loneliness during the COVID lockdown. This leads him to an incredible friendship with an unlikely creature from the ocean. This inspiring film brings awareness to our connection with nature and the importance of caring for our environment and the amazing creatures we share this world with.

An Alaskan Fight – Running becomes a metaphor for the conservation effort to protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

Iridescent – 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.

If You Give a Beach a Bottle – Sketching the tangled web of Marine Debris on Alaska’s remote beaches.

Voices from the Water– River heroes are at the forefront of solving the pollution and waste issues faced by our planet’s waterways. “Voices of Water,” tells the stories of these champions and highlights the direct value of rivers to our community ecosystem and the importance of their role in the health of the planet and climate change. Through the stories of these heroes and the projects, they have undertaken we seek to raise awareness of river plastic pollution, and the commitment to solve the problem at its source upstream.

Black Like Plastic – Black Like Plastic highlights some of the inequities that exist in the Black community in relation to the environment. Locally produced and created, the story is shot on California’s Central Coast. Chris Ragland, founder of The Sea League, narrates the film bringing to light the connection between access, outdoor recreation, and advocacy. Featured in the film are youth, parents, and environmental advocates.

A Baffin Vacation – Erik Boomer and Sarah McNair-Landry set off on a bold multi-sport 45-day expedition traveling through the remote landscape of Baffin Island in search of stunning cliffs to climb and unexplored rivers to whitewater kayak.

The Voice of a River – Mark Dubious’ act of sacrifice for the Stanislaus River is the simplest, most effective form of activism, one rooted in love.