The fifth Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival ran from October 9 to 11 at the Blue Hall at NYU Abu Dhabi, opening with the Arabian Gulf premiere of Werner Herzog’s Ghost Elephants. Held in collaboration with Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, the event focused on people’s relationship with nature and the work being done to repair it.
This year’s theme was Mend, taken from the Arabic verb rammim, meaning to repair or restore something of value. Artistic director Nezar Andary said he did not want environmental cinema to overwhelm audiences with alarming statistics or tell them how to live, and rejected the idea of a pristine nature that must be kept untouched. “Mending is something we’re constantly doing, and it’s something the Earth itself does,” he said. He traces the festival’s approach to 2020 and to a small environmental film festival at Princeton Public Library in the US that favoured creative documentaries over campaigning.
Ghost Elephants, made for National Geographic, follows the search for elusive elephant herds in Angola and premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. The line-up also featured Sara Dosa’s Oscar-nominated 2022 documentary Fire of Love, about French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, and her 2026 Sundance film Time and Water, which screened at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi with a free museum tour. Fungi: Web of Life, narrated by Björk, Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Berlin short Chuuraa and a restored 4K print of Shyam Benegal’s 1976 film Manthan, about a rural Indian dairy co-operative, completed the main programme.
The festival also premiered episodes of Conservation Diaries, a five-part series from Connect with Nature, a youth movement set up by Environment Agency Abu Dhabi and Emirates Nature-WWF. Filmed in UAE wadis, mangroves, coastlines and rural communities, it follows scientists, volunteers and conservationists protecting vulnerable species. A Sunday panel examined ecological restoration in the UAE, and the Saturday family programme included animated shorts and an introduction to fungi from Dima Al Srouri, founder of MycoSphere, a Dubai venture making materials from mycelium and agricultural waste. Since its launch, the festival has drawn more than 5,000 attendees and engaged 2,000 students from more than 20 Abu Dhabi schools, and its school visits continue. Andary said its role is to start conversations that carry on after the credits. “Cinema is not going to heal the environment. We are,” he said.
