Climate 2024 Week: Inaugural Film Festival, Hollywood Summit and Adam McKay Vegan Hot Dog Truck Coming to NYC

A1 Digital India News: The Climate Film Festival begins tonight, followed by the kickoff of New York Climate Week, with a series of events across the city as mandated by the United Nations General Assembly. Watch a celebrity actor (secret until Monday) ride a vegan hot dog truck near Union Square, courtesy of Yellow Dot, the nonprofit production studio founded last year by Adam McKay (Don't Look Up). The dog sauerkraut and mustard Coal and gas pollution are blamed for one in five deaths worldwide.

Media and entertainment are a growing part of Climate Week, which has been started and hosted by the international nonprofit Climate Group for the past 15 years, has its own agenda — with opening night on Sunday — and is affiliated with hundreds of other events. The Hollywood Climate Summit, an annual nonprofit event and now well underway in Los Angeles, kicked off with media and climate folks on the East Coast gathering at the DGA Theater for the first time. The event will begin with a private screening of The White House Effect, a documentary by Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and John Schenk that recently premiered in Telluride. Al Gore will introduce the film. Elsewhere, studio executives and filmmakers will gather at the NYC Solutions House for a panel on sustainable filmmaking and storytelling.

The Climate Film Festival, or CFF, hopes to become a mainstay and anchor, beginning with 59 films selected from 300 submissions to a 15-member jury from the film and climate worlds, including narrative features and documentaries, shorts and episodes.

One of the highlights was a special screening of DreamWorks Animation/Universal's The Wild Robot. Art historian and curator J. "We're very excited," said Alec Turnbull, who co-founded the CFF with English Cook. DreamWorks Animation's 'The Wild Robot' DreamWorks Animation

"There are so many big blockbuster films that you can look at and say, yes, this definitely has a climate theme." The Wild Robot is one of them. "There's a lot of potential to intentionally craft and open up those conversations, but the action is already there, they're already being created," he said. The animated survival drama is also a family film that "can really bring this conversation across generations." It will be released in theaters on Sept. 27.

Turnbull and Cook, working with 10 founding volunteers, saw an overwhelming response to a soft festival launch with a few shorts last year, so will work with The Guardian U.S. and other sponsors to launch a larger version.

"The growing understanding of the importance of climate and ... the sheer number of great films, great artists, great filmmakers working in this area, we haven't seen anybody in New York equal it," Cook said. "'Should we start this? Should we do this?' We talked to friends, people in the climate community, people in the film community. Nobody seemed to know if something like this even existed. So we started bringing it to the world.

Pat Swinney Kauffman, head of the NYC Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, will kick off the festival, which is expected to draw more than 2,000 people. The festival will be opened by Nicole Gormley and Debra Aroco of Looking for Amani, who were awarded the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director following its premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Festival. , .

They also sang in Kelly Anderson and Jay Sternberg's doc Emergent City at Tribeca. World premieres include Steve Liptay's feature documentary Valve Turners and the big-screen debut of a documentary responding to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's An Optimist's Guide to the Planet. Docs are still dominated by climate content, although that is slowly changing. Good Energy Studios will host a narrative climate writing workshop.