Tue, Apr 22, 2008 page2

• FEATURE: Film directors make plea for environment at festival

  • By Meggie Lu / STAFF REPORTER
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  Tree huggers and aspiring greenies looking for an informative, educational and meaningful way to celebrate this year’s Earth Day should consider taking the train to Ilan for the fifth annual Green International Film Festival in Taiwan (GIFT), which runs until Sunday.

  While the experience may not be described as “fun,” it promises to provide viewers with a better appreciation of what the ecosystem does for us, more urgency in protecting the environment and a renewed determination to turn off idle electrical appliances and limit their use of plastic bags.

  “The Ilan County Government was founded on the basis of environmental protection,” Ilan County Environmental Protection Bureau chief Tsou Tsan-yang (鄒燦陽), an avid proponent of the festival, said at GIFT’s film premiere in Taipei last week.

  With continuing education units offered to government employees starting this year, Tsou estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 viewers would attend the festival.

  “The idea for GIFT came several years ago when [a group of Ilan government officials] visited Japan’s Yamagata County and saw a film festival [about environmental issues],” he said.

  “After we came back, Democratic Progressive Party legislator Tien Chiu-chin [田秋堇] proposed that we host something similar to educate our students and promote the county to other Taiwanese,” Tsou said.

  This year’s festival includes Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour and South Korean cartoonist Hyunjoo Kim’s (金顯中) cartoon series The White Seal, as well as local documentaries such as The Squid Daddy’s Labor directed by Ke Chin-yuan (柯金源) and Wild Bird’s Ecology in Yilan by Lai Hui-lung (賴輝隆).

  Consumerism, natural catastrophes caused by climate change, labor exploitation and and pollution in third world countries will also be addressed.

  Several directors have been invited to interact with the audience at the festival during question-and-answer sessions.

  “Squid Daddy’s Labor documents a group of environmental volunteers who place bamboo bushes in barren sea beds as artificial reefs,” Ke said during a session on Sunday.

  “One of the volunteers learned the technique during a trip in Southeast Asia, where he observed fishermen dropping banana leaves into the sea to encourage fish to lay their eggs there,” he said.

  Seeing that the marine ecosystem had been drastically altered by human activities such as heavy fishing and waste-dumping, the volunteer summoned a group of like-minded individuals who wanted to give back to the body of water that had nurtured us as a species, Ke said.

  “What touched us was that while humans have been taking, taking and taking from the ocean, the fish in the sea did not seem to hold grudges against us at all — they allowed us to join them and coexisted with us harmoniously,” he said.

  “As most people have not had a chance to see first-hand how perilous living in the ocean has become, we wanted to show this film so that people can understand that conservation is not impossible,” Ke said.

  “As long as we protect the larger environment and wait for [marine animals] to come, the ocean’s natural resources should remain sustainable,” he said.

  One positive turn of events was the large representation of children at the GIFT event. Brought to the festival by parents or teachers, primary school students in Ilan seemed to be accustomed to discussing “grown-up” topics such as global warming and the melting of icecaps in the Antarctic.

  “What impressed me most was when [the cartoon] showed waste water going into the sea,” Yuanshan Elementary School second-grader Joan Chao (趙子湲) told the Taipei Times.

  “I liked how [the cartoon] showed cute but real presentations of animals and ice melting [around the polar bears’ home],” she said.

  The eight-year-old said this was the third year she attended the festival.

  “My mom says the topic [environmental protection] is important,” she said, adding that “The Earth is getting warm and that is not good.”

  The film directors could not have asked for a better response.

  “My cartoons have always been about education or the environment,” Kim told the Taipei Times on Sunday after the screening of The White Seal.

  Although this was her first visit to Taiwan, Kim’s first green-minded production, The Umbrella and a Loach, was shown at the 2005 festival, she said.

  “In [South] Korea, academic competitiveness is a serious problem,” Kim said. “Children are on a fast-track education. They start learning English at the age of one or two … [or] watch cartoons that teach them English, Chinese or mathematics. But most wouldn’t be able to name the plants found in their neighborhood.”

  “We feel that playing outside is more important than studying inside,” said Seok Joon-seo, Kim’s husband and producer.

  “While education is important, the most important [type of] education is teaching children how to live harmoniously with other people and animals, because our future depends on it,” he said.

  That interdependence is evident, the scientists and specialists in The 11th Hour tell us.

  “Humans would be mistaken to think that we are grander, more superior, or separate from the environment,” the film says. “When we say that we are trying to save the Earth and the environment, we are really talking about saving human beings.”
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