How the river runs through it: on the 2021 edition of environment film festival, ALT EFF

The second edition of a virtual environmental film festival features 44 entries and a film that teaches a lesson through the Ganga

“The environment is everyone’s business,” says documentary filmmaker Shridhar Sudhir, and few would disagree. Speaking to us ahead of the second edition of the All Living Things Environmental Film Festival (ALT EFF), where his 2021 documentary, Moving Upstream: Ganga, will be screened, he says this is an event that ‘engages the public on the environment and social issues of our time’.

Contrary to the Ganga’s stereotypical association with religion, often the central focus of films on the subject, his film traces Siddharth Agarwal’s (an aerospace engineer from IIT, Kharagpur) 3,000-kilometre walk from Ganga Sagar in West Bengal to Gangotri, the source of the river. “It was not about looking at the Ganga in isolation,” says Sudhir, adding, “The exclusivity that the paradigms of religion, spirituality and mythology lend to the river makes it the perfect segue into the plights that plague all rivers. In fact, a good case is made for all other rivers when one understands how harshly the narratives of development and urbanisation treat the ‘holiest’ of them.”