Emaho – At Jackson Wild

Jill Ferguson, Impact Producer at Emaho Films, addressing the Climate Action Pathways Session

It was honestly a bit of a whirlwind experience getting invited to Jackson Wild to co-host a session this season and present our short film.

One of the Turtle Walker’s Film Impact Goals was always to analyze our own carbon footprint and use our learning journey to hopefully inspire a larger discussion in the Indian film industry as a whole on the need to be carbon-conscious in our production strategies.

We had been working on various ways to go about doing this with Tom Mustill, of Gripping Films, who is one of the leading voices on green filmmaking internationally. He rightly pointed out that as we are filmmakers, it makes sense to make a film about the need to make the film industry more sustainable and green, and therefore the idea for ‘Free the Footage’ was born.

Screening of ‘Free the Footage’ at Jackson Wild Summit 2022

So when Jackson Wild reached out to him about being on a panel discussion on Green Filmmaking he told them about our campaign and film. Jackson Wild loved the idea and connected us to Samuel Rubin and Heather Fipps from Yea Impact who also wanted to create a more interactive session on Green Filmmaking.

Together we co-designed and cohosted a session called Climate Action Pathways for the Film & Television Industry. Heather and Samuel kicked off the session introducing ENZA (the Entertainment Net Zero Accord) which is an accord they are currently helping to develop for the UNFCCC sectoral initiative for the Film and Television Industry.

Participants at the Climate Action Pathways for Film and TV industry.

As part of the session, Taira screened the ‘Free the Footage’ film and introduced the idea of open-sourced filmmaking as one example of ways in which we could create more carbon-conscious films.

I then broke up the people attending the session into groups to discuss the pain points currently preventing us from moving towards greener industry practices, as well as harvest case studies and potential solutions the community knew of that could act as guiding lights of change for us all.

The session sparked some really interesting and insightful discussions, and I personally left feeling inspired and ready to get to work.

Taira Malaney, Director at Emaho Films speaking to the participants.

This type of session and conversation with stakeholders from the industry is part of our immediate plan. We plan to conduct such sessions for awareness and importation all over the world, with the aim to build an Accord for the Film and Television industry that allows everyone to move forward towards building a more sustainable industry.

We are surely planning to host more of these types of conversations throughout India and Bollywood over the coming years to support the development of this Accord. Because if we have any hope of reaching the Paris Agreement targets to mitigate climate change then every person and industry has to do its part.