The Climate Future Film Festival: Chapter 2 — Youth, Reckoning & Resolve Awards Judge: Edward Norton Honorary Judge: Bill McKibben Best Performance Award: Tilda Swinton
Twelve shorts. Nine countries. One question: what comes next?
A program of Merlyn Climate Grants, this edition of the Climate Future Film Festival is presented by RIFF as a touring micro-festival dedicated to filmmakers responding to climate change.
Telling stories in documentary, drama, animation, humor, and dance, the program traces emotional, artistic, deeply human responses to a heating and changing planet. From rising seas in Bangladesh to drought-stricken regions of India, from intimate domestic moments to collective acts of resistance, these films move between the global and the personal.
Climate and democracy are now front-page news. Off the page, responses are quieter: grief, anger, numbness, anxiety—and, for some, a strange optimism for collapse itself.
This program turns toward those interior landscapes. It has invited filmmakers not to offer solutions, but to engage feeling—through work that is personal, visceral, and formally bold. Taken together, these films hold contradiction: hope and cynicism, denial and grief, rage and tenderness, resilience and resolve.
Four-time Academy Award nominee and climate advocate Edward Norton serves as Awards Judge, selecting recipients for Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Performance. American author and renown environmentalist Bill McKibben serves as Honorary Judge.
The Best Performance Award was presented to Tilda Swinton for her reading of George Orwell’s 1946 essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, in G. Anthony Svatek’s short doc of the same name.
When Chapter One of this festival screened at RIFF in 2024, climate was top of mind. Today, democracy is too. Whether one can be sustained without the other remains an open question. In his introduction to Chapter One, Bill McKibben called for a wave of art capable of lifting climate change into the cultural foreground it requires if meaningful action is to follow.
Art may not offer solutions. It is personal, subjective, unscientific. But action begins with imagination-and is sustained by it. These films contribute to the wave McKibben was calling for.