The effy 2021 lineup
Thank you to our filmmakers, audience, panelists, moderators, and Sponsors for joining us for EFFY 2021!
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WINNING FILMS OF EFFY 2021:
Audience Choice - Best Feature: Gather
Audience Choice - Best Short: Tabira
Wednesday: 3/24
Thursday: 3/25
Friday: 3/26
Saturday: 3/27
PANEL DISCUSSIONS
DAY 1
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24, 2021 (7 PM - 8 PM EST)
Indigenous Food Systems In The Eastern United States
The Indigenous Food Systems in the Eastern U.S. panel focused on the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the eastern United States with particular attention to historical and contemporary relationships to food and will highlight key themes discussed in Gather
Panelists
Danielle Hill
Danielle Hill, founder of Heron-Hill LLC holds an MPA in Sustainable Development from the World Learning Graduate Institute and in 2018 established her consulting business Heron-Hill LLC. She works in various capacities for Tribal governments, Tribal Organizations and Native American non-profits consulting on a variety of Indigenous issues. Danielle is also a student midwife and Doula and is passionate about reviving indigenous birthing practices, promoting food sovereignty, indigenous farming and maintaining Eastern Woodland traditions. As a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and raised in Mashpee all her life, she has witnessed many sightings of Blue Herons on Cape Cod, especially over the past few years. However, more recently almost a dozen have been found mysteriously dead on Tribal lands in Mashpee. In many cultural mythologies, the Heron symbolizes balance, self-reliance and an ability to progress and evolve. Heron-Hill LLC was formed to continue to raise awareness and appreciation of this great bird.
Rachel Beth Sayet
Rachel Beth Sayet or Akitusut (She Who Reads) is a member of the Mohegan nation. Raised with the spirits of her ancestors, she grew up learning traditional stories and teachings and participating in tribal events.
Rachel has always been passionate about and proud of her Mohegan heritage and identity as well as an avid studier and learner about other cultures, indigenous and beyond. History has always been her favorite subject.
Rachel’s other main passion throughout her life has been food. As a child, she grew up cooking with her grandmother and mother. Rachel’s grandmother Phyllis is a Russian American Jew who always been ahead of the curve when it came to food. In the 1980s she taught Chinese cooking classes. Phyllis inspired Rachel to always try different foods and learn to cook cultural cuisines.
Chef Sherry Pocknett
Wampanoag Chef and Entrepreneur, Sherry Pocknett, born and raised in Mashpee to the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. Sherry credits her passion and love of food to both her parents and her tribal life-ways. She was fortunate enough to grow up in the 60's where both parents were Wampanoag and lived traditionally. A Mother from a family of Great Chefs and a Father who provided for the family by hunting, fishing and bartering.
As a child, Sherry was taught to harvest and eat by Seasonality. The Wampanoag New Year starts in the Spring, a time to give thanks to the first greens of the season from fiddlehead ferns to dandelion greens. This was the time when the herring came up the river, and other fish to follow were striped bass and bluefish from the ocean. The water is still nice and cold during the Spring so all the shellfish is amazingly good! Summers brought fresh produce from her Mother's garden right to the dinner table. This was the time for peas, salmon and an abundance of produce from the three sisters garden which consisted of corn, squash and beans. The Fall harvest of cranberries, apples, pears, green corn, potatoes, black walnuts, acorns and all types of shellfish. Winter brought the hearty comfort foods from shellfish to quail to shrimp to yankee pot roast. And of course the delectable Cape bay scallops and venison. Her favorite was always eel season spending time on the frozen bay to watch her father and brothers spear for eels.
It was not long after she entered adulthood that Sherry formed her own business and put her cooking experience forth. With over 25 years of experience, Chef Pocknett has made a name for herself and has traveled up and down the East Coast year after year to food festivals, cultural bazaars and Pow Wows, in addition to catering private and corporate events. In particular, she catered a Pow Wow at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC for 20,000 people. In addition, she has offered her culinary expertise in places like Foxwoods, Mohegan Sun and the Tony Bennett Studios of New York. To add to her experience, she is a culinary instructor involved in teaching local cooking classes in places like William Sonoma, as well as instructing a cultural youth class revolving around seasonality, harvesting and gathering, shell fishing and cooking, not to mention offering her lifetime knowledge about herbs, roots and berries.
Her love for pleasing people’s palates is what keeps her cooking and creating. Her following consists of thousands of people from across the Nation gathering and waiting in line to sample her fares and experience her tasty delights from the land, water and the skies. Sherry is, perhaps, everyone’s favorite; Indian Country’s best known East Coast Chef.
Day 2
thursday, March 25, 2021 (2:30 pm - 3:30 pm est)
Extraction And The Value Of Nature: Who Gets To Decide?
Salomé Jashi
Director, Taming the Garden
Salomé Jashi was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1981. She first studied journalism and worked as a reporter for several years. In 2005 she was awarded a British Council scholarship to study documentary filmmaking at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Salomé’s Taming the Garden [2021] premiered at Sundance and Berlinale Forum. Her The Dazzling Light of Sunset [2016] has been awarded the Main Prize at Visions du Réel’s Regard Neuf Competition as well as at ZagrebDox, Jihlava IDFF, FIC Valdivia and several other festivals. Her earlier work Bakhmaro [2011], made in co-production with ma.ja.de. filmproduktion and MDR/Arte, received an Honorary Mention for a Young Documentary Talent at DOK Leipzig, was awarded as the Best Central and Eastern European Documentary at Jihlava IDFF, and was nominated for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and Silver Eye Awards.
She was a fellow of Nipkow Scholarship in 2017 and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2020.
Mara Menahan
Mara Menahan is a botanical illustrator, an artist, and a naturalist. Through signage, participatory drawing workshops, and paintings, her work asks people to engage with their more-than-human neighbors. She began her career at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. as the in-house botanical illustrator. Since then, she has worked to document threatened landscapes across North America, painting the rare and endemic flora of the Baja peninsula, the headwaters of Bristol Bay, and the temperate rainforest communities of Southeast Alaska. In 2017, Mara joined the fisherman, Elsa Sebastion, and the biologist, Natalie Dawson, to form an all-women ground-truthing team to document the wild beauty of the coastal temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska while bearing witness to destructive logging practices. Mara has also worked seasonally as a science technician at a National Science Foundation research station on the Greenland ice sheet, assisting with atmospheric research and painting the endless variations of ice and sky.
Olivier Pollet
Director, Ophir
Oliver is an investigative journalist and award-winning filmmaker, producer and researcher based in the UK. Over the past decade his works have focused on corporate accountability, human rights, environmental issues and colonial legacies, working alongside indigenous communities in the Asia-Pacific region, and especially in Papua New Guinea. His latest project is the award-winning feature documentary Ophir (2020), alongside its multimedia educational counterpart The Colonial Syndrome.
Day 3
Friday, March 26, 2021 (5 PM - 6 pm EST)
Storytelling With Animals
This discussion explored the filmmakers’ experiences of writing and directing films about and with animals.
Panelists
Aner Etxebarria Moral
Director, Tabira
Aner Etxebarria is a documentary director whose passion for the animals, wildlife and indigenous worlds, has led him to write and direct several documentaries in different countries: Iceland, Mozambique, Bolivia, Mongolia and Brazil for instance. After working as a wildlife cameraman in the Mink Conservation European Programme, for the project “Life” of the European Union he ended up in the Andean Mountain range. He was living there with the Quechua community in Peru and Bolivia, directing and producing short films about the lifestyle, the weaknesses and the gender equity for Non- governmental organizations. In 2013, he founded the Film Production Company Old Port Films in Bilbao. Since then, he has directed and produced several documentaries such as Baskavígin: The Slaughter of the Basque whalers. This last documentary was selected in SSIFF, Reykjavik International film festival as well as awarded in the Richmond film festival. His last production has been "Bayandalai, the Lord of the Taiga”. A short film that digs deeply into the meaning of life and death for the Dukha. One of the most threatened indigenous communities, who lives tightly bound to their holy reindeers in the North of Mongolia. This film was awarded in 12 mountain and nature film festivals and selected in more than 35 of them, BANFF of Canada for instance. Currently, he is co-directing a documentary series along 11 countries, which will tell the audience some of the most impressive existing stories among human beings and the wildlife on our planet.
Ben Masters
Director, American Ocelot
Ben Masters is a filmmaker and writer specializing in wildlife and adventure stories. He is most known for directing the feature-length documentary The River and The Wall (SXSW 2019 Award Winner) and for producing Unbranded (Mountainfilm 2015 Audience Award Winner). Masters studied wildlife biology at Texas A&M University and founded Fin and Fur Films, a production company specializing in short films featuring wildlife research, conservation, and activism. He is the author of two books published by Texas A&M University Press and has written for National Geographic and Western Horseman. His films have been distributed on Netflix, National Geographic, STARZ, PBS, and he has worked with The Wildlife Society, Borderlands Research Institute, YETI, Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation, and other great brands and NGOs. A proud Texan, Masters loves riding a good horse through new country, filming wildlife stories that haven’t been documented before, and using movies to help conserve wildlife and wild places.
Joe Fairbanks
Director, From the Mountains to the Ocean: Turtles of Alabama
JOE FAIRBANKS (he/him) is a conservationist and storyteller from Northern Minnesota. He earned his BA in Film & Media Studies at Dartmouth College and later worked as Dartmouth’s Sustainability Fellow. In 2018, Joe received Dartmouth Film & Media Studies’ J. Blair Watson Award, and in 2019 the Center for Jackson Hole named him an Emerging Leader in the fields of Conservation and Outdoor Recreation. His debut film, Homecoming - A Boundary Waters Story (2019), was a finalist in the 2020 Paddling Film Festival World Tour and premiered at Wild & Scenic Film Festival’s flagship festival.
Panel Moderator
Viveca Morris
Viveca Morris is the Executive Director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program (LEAP) at Yale Law School. LEAP is a multidisciplinary think-and-do tank at Yale dedicated to developing new legal and political strategies to protect animals and their habitats, and to drawing attention to the deep questions of science, conscience, and law raised by humanity’s treatment of other creatures. Viveca co-hosts the Yale University podcast "When We Talk About Animals,” which features in-depth interviews with leading thinkers about animals and what it means to be human.
DAY 4 - TWO PANELS
SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 2021 (1 PM - 2PM EST)
Filmmaking, Tree-Climbing, and Conservation
This discussion showcased the teams’ experience climbing trees in the remote Darien Gap rainforest and learning from the Embera tribe and their conservation efforts.
Panelists
Daniel Byers
Daniel Byers is the Director of Skyship Films. As a documentary filmmaker, he's tracked cartels along the rivers of Honduras, chased the elusive snow leopard through the mountains of Afghanistan, and rafted through the icebergs of glacial lakes in the shadow of Everest. His documentary films have been featured at numerous international festival screenings, events, and museums including the Smithsonian, Dallas Museum of Art, UN Climate Change Conferences, Banff Mountain Film Festival, Environmental Film Festival, and International Wildlife Film Festival.
Katrin Redfern
Katrin Redfern, M.Sc., M.A., M.F.A. is a multimedia producer working in film (two Sundance Festival Official Selections), theater (five Tony Award nominations), photography, radio, and podcasts, from science reporting to writing and directing audio dramas. She writes on conservation, indigenous cultures, and anthropology for various publications. Katrin is a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University and Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St. Andrews. She is also Creative Director of Be Electric Studios, a hub for the photo and film production community in NYC.
Andrew Stern
Andrew Stern is a photographer, cinematographer and film producer whose work has taken him to the planet's farthest reaches on countless projects. His primary areas of concentration are the social and political issues of our time, but he has also photographed campaigns for many titans of industry and technology. His photojournalism has won numerous awards and has appeared in Harpers, The New York Times, The Guardian and many other publications and exhibitions both domestically and internationally. Films he has shot and produced have been featured in and won awards at film festivals including Tribeca Film Festival, Environmental Film Festival, and Wild & Scenic Film Festival. Andrew is also the CEO of Be Electric Studios, a hub for the photo and film production community in NYC that he founded in 2014.
Moderator
Claudia Sanchez de Lozada
Claudia is a second-year Master of Environmental Management (MEM) candidate at the Yale School of the Environment, specializing in Climate Change Science and Solutions. Her academic interests include climate change adaptation, water resources, and international development. Prior to Yale, Claudia worked as an environmental consultant in Latin America and Africa. On her free time, she loves photographing everything and everyone around her.
SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 2021 (5 PM - 6PM EST)
From North to South: Weaving Together Climate Change Narratives
The Climate Change narratives panel discussed the techniques, possibilities and need for linking narratives of climate change impact in communities across the world, focusing on impacts of rising sea levels.
Panelists
Alessandro Rovere (Director of From North to South)
Alessandro Rovere is a Director, Filmmaker, Photographer based out of Berlin. He is the director of “From North to South”, a film on stories of small island states from the North Sea to the South Pacific that are among the lowest producers of CO2, yet are the ones most affected by climate change and rising sea levels. He is always in search for creative projects around audiovisual storytelling and content creation all around the world.
Click HERE to see the agenda of films you will be able to view remotely.
Arne Dunker
Arne Dunker is the CEO of the Climate House Museum in Bremerhaven, Germany. As a major contributor to the film From North to South, Arne Dunker has several years of experience in curating thought-provoking and interactive exhibitions on climate change and its devastating impacts on communities across the world.
Jana Steingaesser
Jana Steingaesser studied Anthropology and Australian Indigenous Studies in Frankfurt, Heidelberg and Perth and has been working as a journalist and author with focus on climate change and water issues for many years. Why that focus? One day she asked herself why her own action lacks too far behind her knowledge, realizing that it is empathic story telling rather than abstract numbers and figures that gets people on board. Jana works for Okeanos – Foundation for the Sea (https://okeanos-foundation.org), combining environmental storytelling and project management for the protection of marine environments
Moderator
Krista Shennum
Krista Shennum (she/her) is a Master of Environmental Management candidate at the Yale School of the Environment, where she is focused on advancing climate justice and human rights. At Yale, Krista is a leader of the Climate Change Science and Solutions Learning Community and the Yale Environmental Women Student Interest Group, and she was chair of the Yale Oceans and Climate Conference.