"LOVED my time at your film festival when you showcased "Paradise Island" in 2016! You guys even brought in someone from the Philippines who could also shed light on the issues my film was addressing. Thank you!"
- Kat Jayme, filmmaker
EFFY MEMORIES
by Emily Schosid, EFFY 2011-2013
It has been nearly 6 years since I graduated from FES, nearly 5 since I helped out with my last EFFY. When I think back on my time at Yale, stories from EFFY nearly always bubble up to the surface first. Stories from EFFY are what I tell at parties. They’re what I tell at job interviews. On first dates.
Sometimes the time working on EFFY felt long, laborious, mundane. Never-ending logistics, a constant stream of emails and text messages, more bad movies than I could ever count. There were spikes of excitement and surprise - unexpected celebrity audience members, a sold-out opening night, winning the Kroon Cup, being recognized by the Dean. And there were spikes of frustration and sadness - speakers who cancelled at the last minute, showing a film that audiences did not love, having to watch a much-loved teammate battle breast cancer.
Now all of these moments make me feel contented. I remember a night eating Indian delivery with the team during a late-night film-watching marathon and a looming decision deadline. We felt like we’d done nothing but watch bad documentary after bad documentary, and we knew that we had to make the call on what films would make it to our final lineup. Everyone was tired. Everyone was cranky. Frustrated. The room was split on the last few films that were up for consideration. We watched them again. We argued again. And then - I spilled curry all down my sweater. All over. Sweater ruined forever. And that broke the tension. We laughed. It was so late at night, and we felt like the work had only just begun. But the strong opinions relented, we wrote up our list of final selections, and walked home in the cold early-morning. And I smile to remember that night.
In the year after I graduated, I was working at FES and the EFFY Leadership team took me on as a “special advisor.” They gave me a night of the festival to program and oversee, and that night remains perhaps one of my most treasured EFFY moments. That night just happened to overlap the visits of three different filmmakers in town for their films’ screenings. Then-Dean Peter Crane was our panel moderator (he simply loved EFFY), and the panel included two incredible, distinguished Yale professors. A fantastic group of volunteers and EFFY team members had come out to help run the logistics of the night and, after the events were over, it was the custom to take the panel, visiting filmmakers, and volunteers out to dinner. I was overwhelmed with gratitude in how well the night had gone, so we opted for a huge feast at a local Indian restaurant. And just looking up and down our huge table, eating spicy food late at night, talking about all the wonderful projects our guests were working on, all the questions our students had, the giant smile on our Dean’s face - I knew we had created something truly amazing.
And now it’s the 10th year of this Festival. It has continued to grow and become even more amazing. The little green EFFY monster, a creation that our team discussed in circles during the festival’s third year (would he damage the professionalism of our festival? Would he inject a feeling of fun and whimsy into our marketing? Would people be confused by him?) now wanders the halls of Kroon during April - alive and fully life-sized. I wore the EFFY monster on my graduation cap in 2012, a testament to how central he and the festival were to my experience at FES.
I feel honored to have been part of something so wonderful as EFFY, and it makes my heart sing knowing that it did not die, as so many student efforts can when their champions graduate and move on, but rather it has become even bigger and better than what I ever imagined it could be.
So congrats on your 10th birthday, EFFY. Here’s to 10, 20, 30 more!
MESSAGE FROM THE EFFY 2018 DIRECTOR
This coming year's 2018 Festival will be the 10th Annual Environmental Film Festival at Yale! We are thrilled that EFFY has continued to bring together the New Haven, Environmental, and Media communities for each of these past ten years. We are thankful to the people and the community that have made EFFY the impactful festival that it has become.
As always, the festival will be free, and open to the public. In addition, in celebration of the 10 years of EFFY, we invite our long-time, committed EFFY-goers and past EFFY-affiliates to submit their story - tell us a little bit about why you come to EFFY each year, send us a poem, or photos, or favorite EFFY memory! Just email it to yaleeffy@gmail.com.
Meanwhile, the EFFY board is busily working away in the background to get the best environmental films of 2017 for the 2018 festival. We look forward to another wonderful festival this coming April!
With sincere thanks,
Emma Crow-Willard, EFFY 2018 Director
Message from the EFFY 2017 Directors
For the past nine years, the Environmental Film Festival at Yale (EFFY) has provided a stage through which filmmakers have showcased the environmental tragedies becoming all too commonplace across the United States and the world. In 2016 our festival screened 22 different films (to over 1,500 attendees) from all over the world, with topics ranging from unsustainable logging in SE Asia to strip mining in Appalachia, and nearly everything in between. Today, after six months of mental processing, these films and the people whose stories were told within them continue to both influence our lives and haunt our nightmares.
In 2017 EFFY is firmly established as one of the premier student-run environmental film festivals. Correspondingly, the opportunity to showcase unique films sourced from places far beyond the borders of New Haven, CT has grown exponentially. It is with that opportunity in mind that the two of us, Michael Warady and Anna Fiastro, have decided to jointly take on the role of Co-Executive Directors for EFFY 2017. We have both had the privilege of working with the festival for the past two years, and we have been able to see firsthand the many changes that have occurred as the festival has increased in size. We hope to continue building on the success of our predecessors as we bring audience members a unique, entertaining, and educational movie experience. We are excited to continue EFFY’s awesome tradition of spreading important environmental messages through the medium of film.
While acknowledging the successes of our predecessors, EFFY 2017 will also experience some significant changes from previous years. In addition to the beautiful redesign of our EFFY logo, website, and laurel that you see here (thanks to our Marketing Director Leah Michaelsen), we also seek to institute a more compact and impactful festival. EFFY 2017 will span across four nights of movie screenings, rather than nine as in previous years, and one of these nights will be hosted off of Yale’s Campus (for the first time ever!) in downtown New Haven. EFFY 2017 will seek to establish stronger ties to the New Haven community, as we hope to source films not only from exotic locales across the globe but also from right here locally – as there are countless environmental concerns that exist right outside of Yale’s gates. In addition, it is exciting to see that the quality of film submissions continues to improve. EFFY 2017 has already received 2x the number of submissions that it received in all of 2016! We are honored for EFFY’s brand to be growing so rapidly, and we are excited to begin the film selection process after the New Year. EFFY 2017 will also build on last year’s significant data analytics drive. We hope to gain further understanding as to who our audience members are and how we can best continue spreading the EFFY message to those we have not yet reached. More to come on this later.
Finally, and it should go without saying, we are extremely excited to be joined in our EFFY 2017 adventure by the remainder of our Executive Board members: Leah Michaelsen, Olivia Sanchez Bandini, and Emma Crow-Willard. The team has already put in countless hours as we begin to lay the groundwork for what is going to be an incredible festival just six short months away. If you have any questions about the festival, please feel free to reach out on our website or directly to us at michael.warady@yale.edu or anna.fiastro@yale.edu. See you in April!
-Michael and Anna
