Non-profit Parki Ar Minda is an eco-educational group which this year played host to the annual ECOCUP International Green Film Festival, held on December 16 and 17 in Tbilisi. The festival went from early afternoon into late evening and featured six documentaries that focused on topics about pollution, climate crisis and solutions to solving it, the loss of biodiversity, and how the tourism industry affects ecosystems and agriculture. Co-founder of Parki Ar Minda, Tatiana Remneva, said they were glad the non-profit was able to participate in the event.
“We’re very happy with the partnership we have, we think it’s very beneficial for everyone. Showing documentaries about these topics is very beneficial to raising awareness and to inspiring people to make changes in their everyday lives and businesses,” she told GEORGIA TODAY.
Each year, ECOCUP organizes a green film festival in a different country, and this is the first time Parki Ar Minda has been involved in hosting it. Remneva notes they have had a partnership with the company for some five years, and when they were looking for the next country to host the festival, the Georgia-based organization approached them. Parki Ar Minda assisted in picking the documentaries – they were given a list that they were able to choose from, and Remneva said they tried to pick ones with global issues that were also important to Georgia.
Each documentary was followed by a discussion led by a local expert on the given topic to tie the films into what is happening locally within the country. Remneva tells us that all the documentaries were international, coming from the United States, Canada, Austria, Belgium, etc., and since they didn’t have the time or resources to fly over the directors of the films themselves, bringing in local experts was the next best thing. In the future, Parki Ar Minda hopes to have more time to prepare for the event and would like to do open calls for Georgian directors, so they, too, can showcase their work.
An eco-activist and founder of Tene Company Sandro Liluashvili was one of the discussion initiators at the festival. His company focuses on creating environmentally friendly USB chargers and cables from recycled waste. He said he has a strong passion for the plastic-free movement, because the material, although powerful, is being used incorrectly.
“It is a unique material that lives almost for an eternity, and somehow we need to become smarter, to figure out how to not eliminate plastic, but to live in harmony with nature while using it for our needs,” said Liluashvili.
Liluashvili prides himself on creating a product that isn’t single use, as it can be used for at least a year, but figuring out what to do with it afterward always bothered him. Through experiments and trying to figure out how to reuse cables after they “go bad,” he discovered that in 90% of cases, only the head of a charger goes bad, not the cable or the USB adaptor that plugs into the block. Therefore, he found a method to only change the head once it goes bad, so the rest of the electronic can be reused instead of thrown in the waste.
The eco-activist said the festival acted as an important space for people to share knowledge about the environmental situation in the world, and noted he has hopes that the documentaries will become known to many because they are interesting and always keep people wondering what’s going to happen next. He adds that it’s important to watch and understand the details to comprehend what’s going on in the world around us.
“I grew [there, watching those films], understood many things, people, attitudes,” said Liluashvili. “I saw many places in the world that I cannot see from Georgia; saw with my own eyes to understand what is happening all over the world.”
The six documentaries shown were: Plastic Fantastic (Germany, 2023, Dir: Isa Willinger), Duty of Care (Belgium, 2022, Dir: Nic Balthazar), All that Breathes (UK, US, India, 2022, Dir: Shaunak Sen), The Last Tourist (Canada, 2021, Dir: Tyson Sadler), Matter out of Place (Austria, 2022, Dir: Nikolaus Geyrhalter), and Common Ground (US, 2023, Dir: Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell).
Remneva said the event was free to the public and around 200 people showed up over the two days. In addition to showing documentaries, Parki Ar Minda also hosted two special events for guests to participate and physically engage in – the presentation of results from the Eco-Exchange program that was funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a workshop entitled “That’s your place in the system” held by ECOCUP co-founder Anastasia Laukannen.
The experts who held discussions after the documentaries are as follows: Sandro Liluashvili; Isa Willinger the director of “Plastic Fantastic”; Nino Toriashvili and Sandro Chitanava from Nature Conservation Georgia; Nikoloz Doborjginidze, an expert in regenerative agriculture; Data Tsintsadze, the founder of Data’s Garden and the Napirze project; Levan Asatiani, a project manager of UNDP program “Improving the Rule of Law and Access to Justice for All”; and Mariam Pesvianidze and Tatiana Remneva, the founders of Parki Ar Minda.
By Shelbi R. Ankiewicz
