Local Filmmakers to Show Off Their 'Green' Films Tonight

Some of the area’s brightest minds will show off their filmmaking talents—and their concern for the planet.

In its sixth year, local youth and adults will compete in the Greenlight Earth Day Film Festival Thursday night and showcase their own homemade films about what they and others can do to reduce their carbon footprint. Several Mountain View residents have made the finals of this year's festival.

“It was started as a way to get young people involved in thinking critically about what they can do to improve their impact on the environment,” said Brad Sanzenbacher, youth services coordinator for the Media Center in Palo Alto, which founded the annual event. “So to do that through the medium of filmmaking inspires them to tell that through technology.”

Five finalists will be selected from each of the three age categories—middle school, high school, adults and from the open division. The finalist's film get screened and awarded prizes at Thursday's film festival at the , 4000 Middlefield Rd. in Palo Alto.

“We have a very fun crop of quality films this year, and we're excited to meet the filmmakers,” said Sanzenbacher, who has helped judge the films. “We received about 30 submissions from Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose, East Palo Alto, Los Altos and a few other cities in the region.”

The cities of Palo Alto and Mountain View serve as sponsors of this year’s festival.

Grace Chen, a student at in Mountain View, and her partner, Max Martinez, from Valley Christian High School in San Jose, chose a unique theme for their film—alternative energy sources.

“The issues of our limited supply of oil and coal resources, as well as the harmful effects they have on the environment, have been getting a lot of attention in the media and news lately,” said Chen. "So, I wanted to look at the resources we have to find a solution to this issue."

Chen and Martinez traveled far and wide to interview experts in the fields of green technology and alternative energy, including a few from a bio-sciences research facility in Berkeley and a geo-thermal company in Sausalito.

What they discovered, Chen explained, gave them hope that a widespread solution to the issue can and will be found soon. Therefore, they wanted to share the information with as many people as would watch their film.

“With our film, we wanted to not only spread awareness of alternative fuel sources that are out there, but also to let people know that this idea of ‘green technology’ is real and it’s out there,” she said. “It’s not so far-fetched anymore, and it’s being researched and developed right here and right now, in Bay Area communities.”

David Simon of Los Altos, a finalist in the festival, explored urban planning as a method to reduce the amount of transportation and congestion in his film.

"My film is about the need for us to consider how we're going to build our housing in such a way as to reduce our energy expenditures, particularly in transportation," he explained.

Through his film, Simon encouraged people to build or buy their houses closer to work, school, stores and "city centers," to reduce the need for so much transportation in our everyday lives. He added that more and more, housing developers and house buyers creep further and further away to new developments, such as the booming housing markets in south San Jose and Morgan Hill, rather than create more housing near our city centers and the places we go every day.

"We need to set up our politics in such a way as to work with developers to build more housing with that in mind," he said. "If we don't, we're just going to have more traffic, more smog, more pollution and, thereby, more health problems."

Gary McSweeney, a teacher at the in Palo Alto, decided to make a class project out of the film competition and opened it up to his middle-school class for topic ideas.

“We decided to get to the root of the problem, from a psychological standpoint,” McSweeney explained. "I thought, the real root of the problem must be an underlying reason like greed, or something to that effect, that is behind why we do these crazy things to the planet."

He opened up the question to his class. The students came up with several reasons that they thought would make more of a long-lasting, positive effect on the health of the planet.

“One student suggested, if we could just educate everyone more, maybe we wouldn’t make such selfish choices,” he said.

Mountain View's Chen and Martinez thought the Greenlight Earth Day Film Festival would be another great way to call attention to the issues of the environment.

“We thought it could help show our video to an even wider audience," she said, "and maybe it can inform and encourage people to take action."

For more information, visit midpenmedia.org.