NYWIFT Industry Screening: ‘The Land of Azaba’ + Q&A with Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss

Join us for a screening of The Land of Azaba screening from July 9th, 2021 through July 12th. Followed by a conversation with Directors Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss.

Addressing climate change is the existential question of our time, but climate change and bio-diversity loss are two sides to the same coin. The Land of Azaba is the first feature documentary on the subject of ecological restoration, and it is set in one of the world’s first “hot spots” for increasing and maintaining bio-diversity, Campanarios de Azaba Nature Reserve in Western Spain. Ecological restoration is a worldwide movement to turn back the tide of mass extinction and restore planet earth to ecological balance.

The Land of Azaba immerses the viewer in a magical world where humans and wildlife work together to restore the largest remaining tract of wild nature in western Europe. The survival of many rare and endangered species, including ancient oaks, insects, vultures, aurochs and horses, is at stake. The documentary closely observes the radical new experiment of ecological restoration as it unfolds, with the promise of bringing back our degraded planet to a balance that supports all living things.

Screening Dates: Film available from Friday, July 9th starting at 9:00AM through Monday, July 12th ending at 12:00AM
Q&A: Monday, July 12th at 4:00pm ET with Directors Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss. Moderated by NYWIFT Program Manager, Barbara Vasconez.
How to See the Film: A personalized link will be sent to each registrant from Cinesend. 
Cost: $2 NYWIFT Members / $3 Non-Members + Q&A is Free

Register

Panelists

Andrea Weiss is an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker and nonfiction author. Her books include Paris Was A Woman (Harper Collins, 1995; Counterpoint Press, 2013), which was winner of a Lambda Literary Award, Vampires And Violets (Penguin, 1993), and In The Shadow Of The Magic Mountain: The Erika And Klaus Mann Story (University of Chicago Press, 2008), which won a Publishing Triangle Award for Best Nonfiction. They have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Korean, Swedish, Japanese, Slovenian and Croatian. Andrea is the writer/director of Bones of Contention, a feature documentary delving into the historical memory movement in Spain and the unknown story of LGBT repression under the Franco dictatorship. Bones of Contention premiered in the Berlin Film Festival, screened on the film festival circuit around the world, and had an art-house cinema release in Spain. It won several jury and audience awards, including in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Valladolid, Spain. She is also co-writer/director (with Wieland Speck) of Escape To Life, a feature documentary about the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann which premiered in the Rotterdam Film Festival followed by a wide European theatrical and television release. Her other film credits include U.N. Fever, Recall Florida, I Live At Ground Zero, Seed Of Sarah, Paris Was A Woman, A Bit Of Scarlet, Before Stonewall (for which she won an Emmy Award), International Sweethearts Of Rhythm, and Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women. Andrea has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts as well as a U.S./Spain Fulbright Fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo Artist Colony (New York), Banff Center for the Arts (Canada), D.A.A.D. Artist Program (Berlin), Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), and BigCi (Australia). She holds a Ph.D. in History, and is Professor of Film at the City College of New York, where she co-directs the MFA Program in Film and is Founding Director of The Documentary Forum: CCNY Center for Film, Journalism and Interactive Media.

Greta Schiller is an award-winning independent producer/director of documentary films and the co-founder of Jezebel Productions, a women’s nonprofit production company since 1985. Over the first three decades of her career, her work focused on unearthing lost histories of marginalized groups and writing their experiences into the cultural narrative. For her films Before Stonewall, International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women, Paris Was a Woman, and The Man Who Drove with Mandela, among others, she has received two Emmy Awards, the first US/UK Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Film, Audience Awards for Best Film at numerous festivals from Berlin to Paris to Seattle, and artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts. With these classic documentary films now screening in retrospectives around the world, Greta has turned her attention to films about science, society and the environment. She produced No Dinosaurs in Heaven, an essay film about Creationists earning science degrees in order to sneak the teaching of religion into American public schools, and The Marion Lake Story, which follows the largest community-run ecological restoration project in New York State.

Barbara Vásconez is the Program Manager at New York Women in Film & Television. Before joining NYWIFT, she held the position of General Manager at the Quad Cinema for three years. She has worked for a variety of film festivals, including the Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, Hamptons Film Festival, Montclair Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, DOC NYC, and the Nantucket Film Festival. Her spare time is spent programming panels and creating unique community engagement opportunities for the New York Latino Film Festival. In 2019, she launched and founded the Ville Film Festival in Somerville, New Jersey. In 2020, she joined the Ecuadorian Film Festival as Co-Director. Her educational goals include working to develop film programs in New Jersey that improve film education for low income students. She works on amplifying the Latinx community and speaking on important issues like immigration and minimum wage. She is committed to the importance of film as a means of community engagement. Barbara has a degree in Film and Video Production from the School of Visual arts in NYC and holds a Business certificate from W.O.R.C in Philadelphia.