“That film should be shown at every school in the country!”
IN RESPONSE TO COVID-19, this initiative is on hold and we hope to resume in the 2020-2021 school year.
For years, our audience members have come out of theaters with this request. We hear you and agree! ACFF is proud to launch a new pilot project, the Films to Schools Initiative, this spring. Because our festival is shifting seasons this year, we have a window of opportunity to devote to bringing educational films screened at our Festival into classrooms in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia in 2020. If the FtS program is successful, we will explore ways to continue and expand.
In the first phase, K-12 public school teachers who take advantage of this initiative will be able to choose from three award-winning films produced by HHMI’s Tangled Bank Studios. These science-based documentaries are designed to inspire and inform students on environmental issues, and each comes with lesson materials for teachers that are tied to Next Generation Science Standards. Importantly, these films and materials will be available at no cost to the schools.
Upon request, an ACFF representative will schedule classroom screenings in Jefferson, Berkeley and Morgan Counties in West Virginia, through May of 2020. Our hope is to schedule up to twenty classroom screenings this spring. We’re incredibly grateful for the generosity of HHMI’s Tangled Bank Studios for making these films available to the students of West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle.
If you would like more information or to request a screening as part of this program, please contact Hilary Lo at: hilary@conservationfilmfest.org
Backyard Wilderness
FILM SYNOPSIS
Backyard Wilderness will surprise and entertain viewers with the unexpected wonders of nature that are right under our noses—in our own backyards. Spanning a seasonal year around a suburban home, the film displays a stunning array of unique wildlife images and behavior—all captured by cameras mounted inside dens and nests, and moving along the forest floor and pond bottom, to reveal its inhabitants in rare and breathtaking intimacy.
We follow Katie, a young girl, and her modern family living next to the woods who are blind to the real-life spectacle around them, absorbed by an array of electronic devices in their busy lives. Katie gradually discovers the intricate secrets that nature has hidden so close to her front door and we experience the joy she finds in her interactions with this new world. The film reminds us that Wi-Fi is not the only connection that matters and that sometimes in ordinary places, you can uncover extraordinary things that could transform you forever – you just need to step outside.
45 MINUTES
Recommended for Grades 3 – 8
The Backyard Wilderness educational materials were created in partnership with the California Academy of Sciences education department. They engage students in fun, data-driven science investigation.
Inventing Tomorrow
FILM SYNOPSIS
Inventing Tomorrow follows young scientists from Indonesia, Hawaii, India, and Mexico as they tackle some of the most complex environmental issues in their communities and prepare to present and defend their original research at the International Science and Engineering Fair. Considered the Olympics of high school science fairs, ISEF attracts approximately 1,800 finalists from more than 75 countries, regions, and territories every year. Winning the competition may seem to be the students’ immediate goal, but the heart of the story is their desire to create innovative solutions to fix immediate environmental threats in their own backyards.
55 MINUTES
Recommended for Middle & High School Students
The teaching guide includes a unique set of four lessons to accompany existing courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It is designed as a set of flexible lessons to fit your specific learning objectives and could include:
A) Integrating each lesson independently into studies on topics such as soil filtration, air pollution, ocean habitats, mining, biodiversity loss, water quality, and human impact on natural resources.
B) Integrating the film and the four lessons using this sequence:
- Soil: Understanding the Soil as a Filter
- Air: Innovations to Clean Our Air
- Oceans: Mitigating Industrial Pollution in our Oceans
- Water: Citizen Scientist Efforts to Maintain Freshwater Bodies
The Serengeti Rules
FILM SYNOPSIS
Academy Award-winning Passion Pictures and HHMI Tangled Bank Studios present one of the most important but untold science stories of our time—a tale with profound implications for the fate of life on our planet. Beginning in the 1960s, a small band of young scientists headed out into the wilderness, driven by an insatiable curiosity about how nature works. Immersed in some of the most remote and spectacular places on Earth—from the majestic Serengeti to the Amazon jungle; from the Arctic Ocean to Pacific tide pools—they discovered a single set of rules that govern all life.
Now in the twilight of their eminent careers, these five unsung heroes of modern ecology share the stories of their adventures, reveal how their pioneering work flipped our view of nature on its head, and give us a chance to reimagine the world as it could and should be.
54 MINUTES
Recommended for Middle & High School Students
The educator guide includes 10 lessons with downloadable videos, interactive media and activities. Curriculum connections and science practices are all included for anatomy and physiology, ecology and environmental science. The lessons are scalable to work in general high school courses, AP high school courses and with potential to adapt for middle school courses.
