Eco Reels - Climate Charche Edition to be held in Bengaluru

An upcoming film festival, Eco Reels - Climate Charche Edition, which is being organised by BSF in collaboration with the Kriti Film Club for the first time in the city, seeks to do precisely this, aiming to spotlight pressing issues of climate crisis, adaptation and mitigation, environmental challenges and people’s struggles in this context, scientific and policy debates, across urban and rural landscapes, as the event’s release states. “The curated films will bring to the fore issues of urban flooding, heat, pollution, waste and more, as well as rural concerns around water, waste, and other climatic impacts on people and natural resources, as well as innovations, adaptation and mitigation strategies,” it adds.

Climate change adds a whole new layer of challenges to an already dysfunctional society, says Manasi Pingle, Coordinator of Bengaluru Sustainability Forum (BSF), a city-based initiative focusing on sustainability. “There are numerous long-standing issues arising from inequity and injustice,” says Pingle, who believes that it is, therefore, essential to foreground the impact of climate on already-vulnerable communities and “develop a people’s vocabulary to understand and articulate what is happening…maybe talk about it from different angles.”

An upcoming film festival, Eco Reels - Climate Charche Edition, which is being organised by BSF in collaboration with the Kriti Film Club for the first time in the city, seeks to do precisely this, aiming to spotlight pressing issues of climate crisis, adaptation and mitigation, environmental challenges and people’s struggles in this context, scientific and policy debates, across urban and rural landscapes, as the event’s release states. “The curated films will bring to the fore issues of urban flooding, heat, pollution, waste and more, as well as rural concerns around water, waste, and other climatic impacts on people and natural resources, as well as innovations, adaptation and mitigation strategies,” it adds.

While BSF and Kriti have collaborated on other occasions, this is the first time Eco Reels will be held in Bengaluru. According to Pingle, over the past year, BSF has engaged in different events, including lectures, group discussions, and capacity-building workshops under the Climate Charche series, “to look at the interconnections between climate and various city systems.” She adds that they also wanted to do a film festival because it allowed them to take these critical conversations to a larger audience.

Aanchal Kapur, the founder of the Kriti Film Club, says that films are a very powerful medium as they tell stories and allow people to feel, think about and even act upon the issues they weave in. “Linkages are made through the diverse stories that the films tell.” Additionally, charcha or discussion has been integral to every film screening at Kriti. “We don’t just show a film and leave. We always discuss the film and engage the audience with attending filmmakers, invited experts or social practitioners.”

Eco Reels - Climate Charche Edition will be held over four days at four venues in the city: Mount Carmel College, JAIN (Deemed-to-be-University), Gandhi Bhavan and CHRIST (Deemed-to-be-University. “One of the things we also wanted to try and do is see how to decentralise so that it is easy for people to go to the place closest to them,” says Pingle. Also, “even though it’s happening in academic spaces on three of the four days, it’s open to the public, and different films are playing on different days.”

Some of the films which will be screened include Samayada Harivu, set on the banks of the historic Begur Lake; Bhed Chal, about the pastoralist kurbā community; The Weight of Water, which explores how communities in Nepal are being impacted by flooding and drought and Gomala: Commons under Threat, focusing on the government-reserved land in Karnataka used to graze livestock. “What is central to our curation is to bring in the core and the periphery into the public domain and look at the interconnections,” says Kapur, who believes that community and community voices are integral to the climate change discourse.

To know more, log into www.bengalurusustainabilityforum.org/eco-reels-climate-charche-edition