There were grand plans for the milestone 10th San Francisco Green Film Festival in September. In less than a decade, the festival of movies that focused on environmental issues had grown considerably and had formed impressive partnerships with the U.N. Environment Programme and San Francisco’s 2018 Global Climate Action Summit, among others.
But founder and CEO Rachel Caplan, an expert in the fragile worlds of both the environment and the arts, did not see a path forward during the coronavirus pandemic. She announced Thursday, July 16, on the festival’s website,www.greenfilmfest.org, that the festival will cease operations immediately.
S.F. Green Fest is the first Bay Area film festival to announce its permanent closure, and Caplan doesn’t think it will be the last.
“I think the pandemic is becoming a mass-extinction-level event for film and arts organizations, and many other nonprofits in different fields,” Caplan told The Chronicle in a video call from her native Scotland, where she traveled from her home in San Francisco recently to spend time with family. “I hate to be the one that brings this news. One of the things we’re blessed with in nonprofits and creative industries such as film is magical thinking. … But that’s really working against us at this moment in time. At some point you’re going to have to accept how tough the times are, and how tough the decisions are that we have to make.”
The Bay Area film festival community is a tight one, and Caplan said she checked in with other organizations before making her decision. She said people running those organizations expressed similar concerns.
“The pandemic has made clear how fragile the models are for many of our film, arts and media organizations and festivals,” Caplan said. “Big festivals are in trouble. Big arts organizations are in trouble. Just a couple of months into this pandemic and it was different than anything we have ever known.”
The S.F. Green Festival has only three full-time employees, including Caplan, but there is also a board of directors, which met recently and agreed unanimously to cease operations.
Other film festivals are trying to ride out the pandemic by, in many cases, furloughing staff and staying in the public eye with virtual festivals that, in most cases, generate little revenue and sponsorship.
But what makes a film festival unique, Caplan said, is the communal experience.
“We did a world premiere of a film called ‘Twelve Pianos,’ ” Caplan said of the closing-night film of the2017 festivalat a sold-out Castro Theatre, about artist Mauro Ffortissimo and thenatural locationsin which he stages his piano installations. “We had grand pianos on the red carpet. We filled the house. Everything collided in that moment: Art, music, film, community, people celebrating and being together.
“The afterparty went on so long at the Castro that they let us go to 1 (a.m.), and then they had to throw us out. People were playing pianos, reciting beat poetry; it was an absolutely wonderful San Francisco event.”
But an event on that scale seems years away from happening again. Even if a vaccine is developed and the pandemic subsides, it figures to be a while before people flock back to movie theaters and other entertainment venues en masse. And who knows what the state of corporate sponsorship and philanthropy will be like then?
Caplan said she feels for art houses such as the Castro and the Roxie, which partnered with the S.F. Green Festival, and hopes they can find a way to survive.
The festival was founded as a four-day event inMarch 2011by Caplan, who had worked at the Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland, and for the San Francisco Film Society and the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival. (She has lived in San Francisco for 17 years and is now an American citizen.)
第一节由60完整的一个d short films, opening with a “green carpet” gala event for “Bag It,” about the the global battle to reduce or ban the use of plastic bags. The inaugural event also included movies on such topics as the fight to preserve San Bruno Mountain, threats to water quality in south Louisiana, and pollution in China caused by the dumping of high-tech devices.
In 2018, the festivalmoved to Septemberto align itself with the annualGlobal Climate Action Summit. The 10th edition would have run for 11 days, Sept. 10-20.
Last year’s festival had a slate that included“5 Blocks,”about the troubled stretch of San Francisco’s Mid-Market Street; “Push,” a global look at affordable housing in big cities; “Cooked: Survival by Zip Code,” which explored the effect of climate disasters on lower-income and marginalized communities; and “16 Sunrises,” about astronauts on the International Space Station who document the changing Earth from above.
Caplan said she is working on a website with an archive of the more than 600 films the festival has shown, and resources for people to get involved in environmental issues.
One thing hasn’t changed: “My passion is the way a film can connect people to social causes and environmental justice, and be this catalyst for social change,” she said.