SF IndieFest presents Green Film Fest
The Green Film Festival of San Francisco
An Essay or, A Reason For Being
THE PAST
For adventurous and curious film goers, San Francisco has long been one of the best cities to live in. Seemingly every weekend features one or more film festivals of various genres, nationalities, identities, and issues. The SF Green Film Festival, the first film festival in San Francisco to focus exclusively on environmental issues, was founded in 2011 and ran for nine years. That festival presented a series of amazing events to audiences eager to learn and engage in environmental-themed storytelling. Because of their leadership in the environmental genre, SF Green was a festival that SF IndieFest and SF DocFest regularly partnered with to co-present and market both our and their environmental film programs in San Francisco.
In 2019, SF Green’s director stepped down, and in 2020 the festival folded. Recognizing a strong demand with San Francisco audiences for environmentally-conscious content, in 2021 SF IndieFest created Livable Planet and presented 67 films from around the world (online-only due to COVID). Livable Planet expanded the concept of what a “green” film festival could be by presenting as part of the program a “midnight movie” tongue-in-cheek horror flick about fast-fashion killer pants.
THE PRESENT
Going forward, SF IndieFest has rebranded Livable Planet Film Fest to take on the more compact and immediately-obvious-to-the-public-what-it-is Green Film Festival of San Francisco. This event takes place April 14-24, 2022 with live screenings at the Roxie Theater as well as additional online on demand screenings via sfindie.com. This festival will again present a series of short and feature length documentary and narrative films as well as animation, the return of the “Eco-Horror Midnight Movie,” a special 50th Anniversary retrospective science fiction offering and other surprises.
THE FUTURE
After deciding on this permanent new name, calendar dates for the Green Film Festival of San Francisco was the next issue. The April 14-24 2022 event will take place as scheduled (to coincide with Earth Day), but beginning in October 2022, the Green Film Festival of San Francisco will move to the Fall. Festivals are notorious for shifting of dates, and with the SF International Film Festival returning to their traditional late April timeframe, it was decided to move the festival out of direct competition with their excellent, can’t-miss programming.
With the Green Film Festival of San Francisco, the 24 year old SF IndieFest hopes to continue to use cinematic storytelling to celebrate the blue marble we all live on while confronting the challenges we face in maintaining a livable planet.
