Coronavirus Pandemic: Making Safer Emergency Hospitals, a film by UK-based CineTecture Ltd on how to convert large air-conditioned spaces into emergency hospitals has won this year’s tve Global Sustainability Film Awards in the nominated category along with My Octopus TeacherDirected by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed.
The tve Global Sustainability Film Awards 2020(tve GSFA), in partnership with Difficult Dialogues, has announced the winners of its eight competitive and two nominated award categories. The online awards presentation was complemented by four thought-provoking Difficult Dialogues panel discussions on crucial themes related to global sustainability as well as the finale of the Daring Debates,a debate competition aimed at engaging the youth from across the world in sustainability-related ideation.
The tve GSFA which is in its ninth year and rewards films both on their creativity as well as on the sustainability impact, had received over a hundred film submissions from 17 countries. A diverse and eminent international jury panel drawn from the fields of sustainability and filmmaking adjudicated on the entries to first come up with three or four shortlisted films for each category and then announced the final winners.
The winners in the competitive Award Categories are: Documentary Impact: (Joint Winners): Once You Know(Pulp Films)and Our Planet: Our Business(WWF-UK); Doing Business Differently: Helping People Put the Planet First(BBC StoryWorks); Transforming Society: BREEF and Rolex Preserve & Protect Nature(The Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation); Campaigning: 10 Myths about Deforestation and Food(WWF-UK); Health and the Environment: A Failure of the Imagination(The Progress Film Company)
Innovations: Turning the Tide(Stramash Films); Solutions News Story: The Man who grew his own Amazon Rainforest(BBC, People Fixing the World); Young Filmmaker: Traces(Sébastien Pins)
Nick Nuttall, Chair of the jury for the tve GSFA 2020 and Strategic Communications Director, Earthday.org said,” Selecting the winners is always tough, but this year was even tougher with the quality, range of issues and creativity even higher in 2020. I hope as many people as possible will watch and share these amazing, winning works far and wide, while being motivated to step up action towards a better world and fired-up to submit their own extraordinary films in 2021”.
The inspiring five-day long online event presented by Difficult Dialogues in partnership with the tve GSFAwas focused on Global Sustainability, a key theme that crucially affects the entire planet. It was well attended by sustainability experts, filmmakers, businesses, not-for-profit organizations, youth leaders and individuals concerned about sustainability.
The agenda was to highlight the current environmental crisis and suggest solutions and actions we need to take today to ensure a better and more sustainable future. This was done through dialogues, debates and films, with abouttwo hours of environment and sustainability content each day.
Commenting at the conclusion of the Awards Week, Surina Narula, MBE, Founder of Difficult Dialogues and the tve GSFA said, “The last week has been a roller coaster ride showcasing the collection of shortlisted and winning films and incisive discussions on developing a more sustainable world including difficult dialogues with businesses because of the dilemma of profit over sustainability. This year going virtual over five days gave us more time to provide a better experience for filmmakers and the visibility to showcase our youth ambassadors and their work.”
The five-day event concluded with the announcement of the winners of Daring Debates which featured the college finalists from India, Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Africa, the USA and Sri Lanka who debated the topic – Is Global Sustainability Profitable for Business? At the end of a keenly contested finale, Gloria Oziohu Alonge from University of Lagos, Nigeria, Africa was declared as the winner for the motion while Aditya Dhar from Harvard University, USA won against the motion.
The Award category sponsors this year were United Living, Global Healthcare, Azad Ayub Ltd and Foundation BNP Paribas (who sponsored the Youth Day), and the Eco Partner was EcoRight Bags.