3RD GLOBAL EXTRACTION FILM FESTIVAL 

OCTOBER 26-30, 2022

STREAMED ONLINE FOR FREE WORLDWIDE

250+ DOCUMENTARIES AND URGENT SHORTS FROM 50+ COUNTRIES

HIGHLIGHTING THE DESTRUCTIVE IMPACTS OF EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES

FESTIVAL TRAILER: VIMEO.COM/748570258

6 FILM PROGRAMS

* GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES * AFRICA IN FOCUS

* URGENT SHORTS * ANIMAL-HUMAN RELATIONS

* PRESENTED BY WATERBEAR * PRESENTED BY DW DOCUMENTARY

& VARIOUS LIVE EVENTS

FULL FESTIVAL PROGRAM: CARIBBEANCREATIVITY.NL

#GEFF2022 #GLOBALEXTRACTIONACTION

Amsterdam (NL), September 12, 2022 – The Global Extraction Film Festival (GEFF), launched in 2020 by Jamaican environmental filmmaker Esther Figueroa (Vagabond Media) and Dutch film scholar-practitioner Emiel Martens (University of Amsterdam, Caribbean Creativity), has announced the selection of over 250 films for the 2022 edition of the festival. GEFF2022, which will be freely available online worldwide from October 26-30, aims to bring attention to the destructive impacts of extractive industries and to highlight communities across the world who are bravely defending against annihilation while creating livable futures.

The Global Extraction Film Festival, which is a no-budget film festival without any outside funding produced through voluntary labour and shared resources, is curated to include many publicly available films that people can access, share, teach, learn from, and be inspired by, all year long. This way, GEFF serves as an educational tool and archival platform for audiovisual content on extraction and exploitation around the world. However, thanks to the generosity of filmmakers and distributors who waive their normal streaming fees, GEFF also presents a varied selection of films that are only available during the festival. These are GEFF’s festival exclusives, and this year the festival has 24 of such films.

GEFF2022 will feature 6 programs with over 250 documentaries and urgent shorts from over 50 countries, with a wide range of compelling topics that everyone needs to think about. Where, how and by whom is the food we eat, water we drink, clothes we wear, materials in our technology, the energy that powers our lives produced and transported? What are we to do with the billions of tons of waste we create daily? What is our relationship to other species and all life on the planet? Unsustainable land use, pollution and the climate crisis are real and cannot be wished away or solved by magical technologies based on extraction.

PROGRAM 1: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES (OFFICIAL SELECTION)

With 12 festival exclusives, the Global Perspectives Program offers 21 riveting documentaries and Lupe Under the Sun, the first narrative feature included in the festival. Since GEFF2022 present an extensive Africa in Focus Program, films in Global Perspectives take the viewer to Asia, Oceania, Europe and the Americas. These films engage with global issues such as extractive agriculture, destructive mining, food culture and what we eat, the crisis of water, species extinction, corporate and governmental corruption, the exploited workers who keep the global economy functioning, and the communities protecting their lands and waters against all odds. Some highlights of films in the Global Perspectives Program are Behemoth, the epic film by world renowned Chinese filmmaker, Zhao Liang, about iron and coal mining in China controlled Mongolia, Water is Worth More Than Lithium, about the fight for the right to access to water which is being dominated by water intensive lithium extraction in South America, and Uprooted, about the devastating impact of deforestation on indigenous peoples in Borneo whose forests were taken as lumber for the Tokyo Olympics.

PROGRAM 2: AFRICA IN FOCUS

The Africa in Focus Program is the festival’s most extensive program offering over 150 feature documentaries and urgent shorts about all 54 countries on the African continent. These films, a combination of documentaries, news programming, YouTube content, and series, are listed first with regional films, then alphabetically by country. While not all African countries are equally represented for accessibility reasons, the Africa in Focus Program provides rich and varied content about the impacts of extraction on a vast region, as well as the many communities who are defending their land, waters, cultures and the future of their continent and planet. The festival exclusives of this program are Baobabs Between Land and Sea, Jesse: The Funeral That Never Ended, Prince of Malabo, Stolen Fish, Strike a Rock and Women Hold Up the Sky.

PROGRAM 3: URGENT SHORTS

The Urgent Shorts Program offers 50 publicly available short films – documentaries, news programming, activist media – that are dealing with urgent issues affecting often overlooked people, revealing the destructive impacts of extractive industries beyond Africa, particularly in Oceania. The Urgent Shorts focus on our forests and oceans, the urgent threats of deforestation, community attempts to save existing forests while growing new ones, learning ways we can better grow the food we eat such as permaculture and food forests, the urgent threats facing our oceans including deep sea mining, the extraction of ‘exotic’ fishes to be kept in aquariums, and plastic pollution.

PROGRAM 4: HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONS

The Animal-Human Relations Program, again curated in collaboration with the Centre for Animal-Human Studies in the Netherlands, comprises over 25 feature documentaries and urgent shorts about the relationship between humans and animals, and the impact of the extractive industries on animals. Humans are animals who dominate the planet and often decide which other animals have value, are our food, our friends, our enemies, are pests, can be sacrificed or made extinct. Just as the exploitation of the planet often benefits big business and rich countries at the expense of marginalized groups of people, so it often comes at the expense of non-human animals to an even greater extent. Most films in this program are publicly available, but there are 6 festival exclusives: Cinco Corazones (Five Hearts), Eyes of the Orangutan, Nature’s Big Year, The Second Life, Turtles on the Hill, and When the Swallows Fly Away.

PROGRAM 5: PRESENTED BY WATERBEAR

The Presented by Waterbear Program offers 17 short docs, including the series The Breakdown and Europe’s Biggest Lie, and 1 feature documentary, Youth Unstoppable, that are produced and streamed by Waterbear, ‘the first interactive video on demand platform dedicated to the future of our planet.’ The selected films, all Waterbear Originals, are about people fighting for environmental and food justice, to protect last wild places and species, and to find community-based solutions.

PROGRAM 6: PRESENTED BY DW DOCUMENTARY

The Presented by DW Documentary Program offers 18 publicly available, feature-length documentaries made and broadcasted by DW Documentary, the documentary platform of the German multilingual TV news network, Deutsche Welle (DW). The originally produced DW documentaries often focus on global issues such as extractive industries, unsustainable development, food insecurity, human rights and climate change – issues GEFF seeks to reveal and discuss at their festival. The curated GEFF program of DW content consists of recent feature documentaries on topics such as The Deceptive Promise of Free Trade, The Climate Exodus, The Future of Travel, The Rise of Big Tech, and Living with Climate Change.  

GEFF2022 LIVE EVENTS

Along with these 6 film programs, there will be several online Q&A’s with filmmakers as well as other live events about extractive industries and their impacts on specific places and peoples. For an overview of these events, as well as for the full and up-to-date program of the festival, please visit caribbeancreativity.nl.

Contact: For more information, visuals and interview requests, please contact Emiel Martens: emiel@caribbeancreativity.nl and/or Esther Figueroa: vagabondmedia1@mac.com.