The 27th annual Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) runs from April 1 through April 14. This year’s special theme is “Turbulence” with events and screenings happening on Ithaca College’s campus and downtown at Cinemapolis.

The festival was in remembrance and celebration of the life of the late Patricia Zimmermann, professor in the Department of Screen Studies, Media Arts, Sciences and Studies at Ithaca College and director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. Zimmermann, who passed away in August 2023, came up with the 2024 festival theme of “Turbulence” in an email to the FLEFF team two months before her passing.

“It’s a bit of an opposite direction from polyphony. … It suggests unsettlings in the air and in society, instabilities, movements and transformative change,” Zimmermann wrote in the email.

Cynthia Henderson, professor of Acting in Ithaca College’s School of Music, Theatre, and Dance and the Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance Performance, has been performing spoken word at the FLEFF opening concert and throughout the festival. Henderson said she has been performing at FLEFF for over 20 years. She said many individuals involved in the festival have felt the absence of Zimmermann because she played such a massive role in the festival.

“It had always been for me a labor of friendship and love because one of my best friends was asking me if I would work on it, and of course, I’m going to say yes,” Henderson said. “I think it’s going to be an incredible festival. And I think the new people running it are going to do an amazing job, it is just not going to be the same because its founding heartbeat is gone.”

Henderson said that while this year’s festival was still wonderful, it is not the same for her and that this year is her last performance at FLEFF, but she would continue to support the festival and attend events.

Andrew Utterson, associate professor in the Department of Screen Studies, and Michael Richardson, professor and director of the Screen Cultures Program in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, were recently named co-directors of FLEFF. Richardson said FLEFF has always been a collaborative project and that Zimmermann helped to inspire and engage people at the festival.

“The thought of a Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival without Dr. Patricia Zimmermann was unthinkable, but even worse would be no Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at all,” Utterson said.

Utterson said they are trying to honor the spirit of collaboration and to see the festival, not as a memorial, but as a celebration and a continuation of the ideas that Zimmermann endorsed.

“What we have tried to do is a simple but vital thing, which is to try to create events that we think Patty would have enjoyed attending,” Utterson said. “And if we can do that, we’re honoring her legacy as well as the legacy of the festival.”

Utterson said they looked at the theme of turbulence to help them frame the selection of events and films that would be taking place. He said turbulence can be seen as a positive change and that is reflective of FLEFF’s programming, conversations and screenings this year.

The opening concert April 2, performed by the Ithaca College Wind Ensemble, featured a concerto for timpani and wind band called “Storm Chasers” by Ukrainian-Australian composer, pianist and recording artist Catherine Likhuta, who was in attendance for the event. Likhuta said she loved the performance and the way it connected to the theme of the festival.

“I love writing programmatic music and sometimes people just use it as a title and they don’t put their heart into it or don’t connect any other pieces on the program with the theme,” Likhuta said. “But when it is used in a meaningful way, I really enjoy it and I feel like it’s the extension of my ideas as an artist.”

Over the past few years, FLEFF has included films created by Ithaca College faculty and alumni. This year was no different with screenings of films such as “23 Mile” directed by Mitch McCabe, assistant professor in the department of Media Arts, Sciences and Studies, on April 5 and “On the Divide,” a documentary made by Ithaca College alumnae Maya Cueva ’15 and Leah Galant ’15, which was screened April 7.

Sen-I Yu, assistant professor in the department of Media Arts, Sciences and Studies, is screening her film “My Heavenly City” at Cinemapolis on April 13. Yu said she is excited about the opportunity to share her film with the community.

“It’s just a great chance to share with the Ithaca community and share with the Park community, and then this being where I work with my students and my colleagues, you know, the chance to show everybody a film two years in the making,” Yu said.

My Heavenly City follows three interrelated stories about the Asian-American experience in New York City and how the movement in the city’s environment affects one’s identity and shows the struggle with loneliness and hope.

FLEFF is the second longest-running environmental film festival in the United States, but it promotes more than just environmental films. The festival brings together different schools within Ithaca College as well as the whole Ithaca community.

Henderson said the festival has always been very purposeful in bringing together students from the Roy H. Park School of Communications with students in the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance and in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

“Patty was always really great about blending and bringing together all of these different disciplines at Ithaca College to create this phenomenon of FLEFF,” Henderson said.

Utterson and Richardson said to truly understand the environment, FLEFF needs to take an intersectional approach.

“We have a much broader understanding of what environment means when we talk about the way that our environment gets impacted, I think we can all agree,” Richardson said. “We live in a turbulent political climate right now, and so some of our films look at that sort of political turbulence in the environment in which we live because these have in many ways just as much, if not more impact, as some of the natural factors.”

Utterson and Richardson said they hope the festival remains a vibrant part of the community going forward.

“We would wanna keep offering the kind of, you know, diverse selections that we provided this year and we’re gonna build on that in future years and continue to explore different collaborations, different possibilities when we talk about visual arts,” Richardson said.

Utterson said he hopes that students at the college grasp the opportunity to be active participants in urgent conversations that span global film culture and that range of environmental and social issues that need to be solved.

“One of the most dynamic elements of the film festival and one of the things we’re most proud of is creating a space that brings together different institutions and audiences and creates a shared space for a collective experience,” Utterson said. “Our bigger goal always is to bring Ithaca to the world and the world to Ithaca, and using the movie screen and the various other venues and arts that we foreground as the way of doing that, a point of contact for a much bigger audience.”