About the Festival
The Earth Connection Film Festival is a short film contest that blends science and the arts, unleashing the power of storytelling to help channel our ideas of environmental change to a more actionable, empowering space. The festival awards $12,000 in screening fees and $5,250 in prizes to the winning films.
This international festival is directed by Dr. Jessica Eise, a researcher with Indiana University, and Prof. Sarah Lasley, an award-winning filmmaker with Cal Poly Humboldt. Amanda Camarillo at the University of Texas at San Antonio leads coordination. They are supported by a wonderful team of students, staff and volunteers.
The festival is inspired by research that has shown how many adults frame environmental issues as a distant phenomenon, which an ineffective framework for action. Areas such as ethics, morality and spirituality have shown much greater promise for encouraging environmental action and appealing to broad swaths of society. Storytelling is a powerful tool to shape people’s inner narratives, and expand our worldview.
The 2024 inaugural festival, funded by the National Science Foundation, took placed at the historic Buskirk-Chumley Theater. The 2026 festival will take place at the IU Cinema—a world-renown arthouse theater located on the Indiana University campus—as part of IU Cinema’s Creative Collaborations program.
The festival features films related to the ethics, morality and spirituality of our relationship with the natural world. The guiding questions are drawn from cutting-edge social scientific research and reflect the general consciousness of adults across a broad swath of identities.
Earth Connection Film Festival 