Green Film Festival presents:
IN EXCESS
In the roiling Anthropocene, the negative image of abundance is waste. Where does it all go? An observational essay on our systems of disposal interwoven with eerily fascinating found footage views, IN EXCESS interrogates labor, infrastructure, and consumption in America. It is also a ghost story, not just of the afterlives of our things, but of a trash-laden ship lost without port.
Combining CCTV surveillance footage, subterranean sewer cams, and vignettes of the people working to keep their city clean, IN EXCESS follows the flow of trash out of Philadelphia and onto a surprising global journey, revealing the hidden ecosystems of waste management and the inevitable ways that trash resurfaces long after we’ve tossed it away.
Q&A with filmmaker expected after the screening.
ELDERS OF TIME
Elders of Time is a short documentary that asks a radical question: What would time look like if it were measured by a lifeform that lives for millennia?
Through the work of artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, a couple of clock makers, dendrochronologists, and The Long Now Foundation, the film follows the creation of a new standard of time based on the growth of Bristlecone Pine Trees, some of the oldest living organisms on Earth. In contrast to Coordinated Universal Time, calibrated by atomic clocks for precision and efficiency, Bristlecone Time is variable, relational, and shaped by climate, place, and survival.
Set between the high desert mountains of eastern Nevada and a clock installed at the Nevada Museum of Art, the film traces the scientific, artistic, and philosophical labor behind this intergenerational experiment. Tree cores, land art installations, and a dual clock system reveal how arboreal time drifts out of sync with human schedules, challenging assumptions about control, progress, and permanence.
As climate change accelerates the growth of trees that evolved to live slowly, Elders of Time asks what it means to build systems meant to last thousands of years and whether learning to listen to nature’s elders can reshape how we live now.
Q&A with filmmaker and subject expected after the screening.
Forget the guilt trip, the Green Film Festival of San Francisco, the mischievous, tree-hugging cousin of the 29 year old SF IndieFest, returns Oct 15-22 to prove that saving the planet doesn't have to feel like homework. We've ditched the doom-and-gloom documentaries that make you want to crawl under a (sustainably sourced) blanket and never come out. The line-up this year pairs sharp environmental storytelling with wit, weirdness, and unapologetic irreverence. And yes, our Eco-Horror midnight movie is back!
Whether you’re an eco-curious cinephile or a die-hard activist, come join in the fun because if we're going to talk about the end of the world as we know it, we might as well laugh, gasp, and maybe even dance a little on the way there. Through this experience the festival hopes audiences can begin to engage with sustainable solutions to the problems facing the planet.