Category - Environmental Art

Winner:
Conversing with Aotearoa 14:30 (New Zealand)
In an age of technological integration and urban life, people turn to the natural world for a wilderness experience. What draws us to the remote corners of land and sea when we realize something in our life is missing? In this animated documentary, New Zealanders attempt to fathom their deep, personal connection with their land. Shot and animated entirely in New Zealand, director and animator Corrie Francis uses a collage of animation techniques to convey not only the richness of the landscape but the stories it holds. Voices of hunters and trampers, fishermen and farmers, mountaineers, adventure-racers, conservationists, ecologists, artists, Pakeha, Maori and tourists, lead us through a visual journey of the wildernesses we find both without and within ourselves.
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Katherine Knight Awards:
Land of Pines 5:00 (Canada)
Through photographic evidence, we take a journey through real and imagined images of that quintessential Canadian tree... the Pine.
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Vraiment? 4:27 (Canada)
When we take much of the earth as ours to behold and control, REALLY? shows us a different perspective of our world. Shot in a small area of only a few hundred square feet in a cove in Canada’s majestic St-Lawrence River, REALLY? opens just a small window in the daily life of a few odd and, often, little known living organisms who thrive and struggle in this rich, yet near freezing, underwater world. Extrapolating this little secluded cove to a planetary scale, one can easily wonder about a very different perception of life and death on earth.
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Florida’s Wild Side 30:00 (U.S.A. Florida)
Take a spectacular journey through a beautiful place with incredible guides! A scientist reveals one of the most entertaining ways dolphins catch their lunch, a reptile enthusiast swims with alligators in crystal-clear water, a mother/daughter team paddles with manatees, an 87 year old artist paints his way through the Everglades, and turtle hatchlings are given a helping hand in a flying boat. 'Florida's Wild Side' is gentle ride through a beautiful place, told through the eyes of amazing people.
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Chiayi Symphony 63:13 (Taiwan)
The film is a sort of symphony of sounds and images which rises up from the Taiwanese mountains and flows down the paddy fields streams of water, to reach the Chinese sea, gathering landscape memories along its path, people's movements, songs and most of all, tracking the ineluctability of everything; the eternal typhoon cycle, approaching as Taiwanese switch on ventilators and disappearing as soon as they switch them off; chickens, geese and pigs cooked, eaten, digested and evacuated; adults and children, games and work; city traffic, markets and hawkers, tv-zapping, puppets and flute lessons.
The film is part of the project ART AS ENVIRONMENT - A CULTURAL ACTION IN TROPIC OF CANCER 2007, promoted by a group of Taiwanese cultural operators and artists, led by the visual conceptual artist Wu Mali and supported by the Chiayi County Government; the aim of the project is the revaluation of a country wasted by a rough and chaotic urbanization, pushing artists to work in some little country villages of the County, thus interacting with villagers and educating them to the idea of art and life.
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Toxico 34:00 (Ecuador)
As the fifth largest oil producer in South America, Ecuador is suffering from the consequences of negligent sins against the environment. Vast quantities of toxic wastewater have transformed the water resources of the primeval forest into deadly marshland. The indigenous people of Amazonia are the worst affected by the disastrous quantities of toxic wastes which have reached the natural cycle as a result of oil extraction and destroyed their whole way of life. Eco-activist/Producer David de Rothschild traveled with prestigious filmmaker Dustin Lynn, acclaimed Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco and South African photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin to the Ecuadorian rain-forest. Together they documented the devastation with artistic resources.
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Category - Aspiring/Novice Filmmaker

Winner:
Internal Currents 11:49 (U.S.A.)
Internal Currents is a short trip through the creation of the universe and ultimately the beauty of the world in its elemental states. Using images of fire, water, nature, animals, various artists and their processes (painting, dance, ceramics, martial arts). Internal Currents presents the evolution of life in it's creative and ultimately destructive aspects then moves on to make a statement about the regenerative power of our world.
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Katherine Knight Award:

Just A Lawn 13:11 (Canada)
Just a Lawn' follows the evolution of the lawn, from an 18th century British aristocratic gardening fashion to an iconic element of the North American suburban landscape. This film examines the complex reasons for the lawn's rise in popularity in the 1940s and 50s and the concomitant rise in pesticide use for controlling some of the 'perfect' lawn's enemies. Most Canadian homeowners greeted the advent of pesticides for lawn maintenance with great enthusiasm. However by the 1960s, the potential danger of these chemicals became apparent.

Just a Lawn' follows an anti-pesticide campaign in Quebec, from the dermatologist who sounded the alarm in 1985 to a courageous teenager with non-Hodgkins lymphoma who insisted that government officials ban pesticides that are dangerous to human health.
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