Please join Climate HQ for our 4th Annual Earth Week FilmFest on Thursday, April 23 from 5:30pm-7pm in Coppola Theater.
This year we are featuring two short films, “Ndjimu (Deep Cobalt)” directed by Congolese filmmaker and activist Petna Ndaliko Katondolo & “In the Maritime Frequencies” directed by School of Cinema professor Greta Snider.
In addition, student projects produced by the Climate HQ Storytellers Fellows will also be featured as part of this special screening. These short audio-visual projects, produced as part of the Climate HQ Storytellers Lab, tell students’ stories of climate and ecological struggle, justice, and resilience.
The annual Climate HQ Earth Week FilmFest is co-produced with the School of Cinema’s Marcus Endowed Chair of Social Justice Filmmaking and co-sponsored by Race & Resistance Studies and the SFSU Office of Sustainability.
Free dinner will be provided after the screenings for all participants and attendees! Please arrive early to secure your seat.
And please stay tuned for event flyer with more info coming soon!
Climate HQ Storytellers' Lab
This interdisciplinary group of Fellows represent a diversity of departments and fields, including Philosophy, Environmental Sciences, Ethnic Studies, and Cinema from both undergraduate and graduate majors. Projects explore indigenous relationships to land and healing, a philosophical meditation on the impacts of AI, a subterranean sewer monster, a view of a future where daylight and energy consumption are controlled by the fascist state, stories of Bay Area teens told in their own voices, and more. Storytelling approaches include documentary, fiction, stop motion animation (using recycled and reclaimed materials), essay & narrative, and experimental film from both seasoned student filmmakers and creators without any previous production experience alike.
Film Synopses
Ndjimu (Deep Cobalt)
Directed by Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Runtime: 31 minutes
In a future fractured by greed and greenwashed progress, a forgotten people live hidden one hundred meters beneath the surface of the earth. They call themselves The Rememberers. Their shelter is carved in ancient stone, where firelight dances across walls lined with Mikuba: cobalt that once fueled empires now pulsing with ancestral memory. For generations, they have dwelled in the deep, speaking in drum codes and stone whispers, guarding the last living ore of truth: the cobalt that remembers.
In the Maritime Frequencies
Directed by Greta Snider (Professor, School of Cinema)
Runtime: 16 minutes
A conversation about how we internalize our climate emergency, letting mortalities large and small emerge only when the night puts our guard down. Inspired by the San Francisco Bay, dreams, and novelist Octavia Butler's vision of a future California. This film embraces the aesthetics of a crumbling society – expired and cast-off film, backyard developing, hand cranked camera – because it is a premonition, a goodbye, and a last look over the shoulder.