Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival
The Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival believes the scope of the environmental issues, such as climate change, can make the subjects distant, abstract, and disconnected to our present. Therefore, we believe it’s the role of artists and gifted communicators to help inspire and stimulate audiences to understand the threats to our planet. We want to make them more visceral, textured, and intimate.
Each year, Al Sidr Environmental Festival not only focuses on a theme, but also seeks to curate both cinematic and artistic achievement at the highest levels. Our films provoke emotional experience and stimulate intellectual ideas. We search for films that represent environmental movements and science in both sophistication and elegant nuance.We differentiate ourselves from media and public relations videos as the films should be created to open audiences to envision new perspectives on the environment and climate change. Finally, we strive to create safe and ethical ways for our city festivals to present themselves-ethical in terms of promoting sustainability.
Nezar Andary
Nezar Andary is a filmmaker, writer, and curator who builds the rooms where cinema, literature, and ecology become engaged conversations. His award-winning documentary Unlocking Doors of Cinema (2020) screened at more than twenty festivals, from Cairo International to San Francisco DocFest to Doc Lisboa. He is completing Just to Get Out There, a feature essay film that crosses the 214 islands of Abu Dhabi with the Odyssey and Hayy Ibn Yaqzan in hand. Educated at Columbia and UCLA, he teaches at the American University in Dubai and co-edits Palgrave Macmillan’s fifteen-volume series Focus on Arab Cinema. A former creative executive at Arab Film Studio, he has been Artistic Director of the Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival at NYU Abu Dhabi for five editions, curates the Khatar Sessions at Cinema Akil, and leads the Performing Books Series at Sharjah’s House of Wisdom. He has served on juries for film funds in Palestine, Qatar, and Jordan. His short story “Y’all Come Back Now” appeared in The Markaz Review.
