Nick Park Helps Launch UN Short Film Contest

The United Nations Forum on Forests, in partnership with the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, recently launched a new global multimedia initiative that highlights the relationship between people and forests. The new initiative, “Forests for People: UN International Short Film Contest,” invited 200 million people in 193 countries to create and share a personal film up to five minutes in length.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Nick Park, the magic behind Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run, helped kick things off with a personal invitation. Watch the video, below, in which Nick talks about his childhood imaginations and personal love of forests:

Jan McAlpine, Director of the UN Forum on Forests Secretariat, said, “Through the visual power of film, we are asking everyone, in every part of the world, to share their own stories of how forests protect, sustain, nurture or inspire them. Together, their films will explore the intricate human connections we have to forests in a way never before told.”

The film festival invites people to tell their forest story using any type of media, from video cameras to mobile footage, animation to photos. The initiative has been launched with a promotional film featuring some of the world’s most renowned nature/wildlife filmmakers who have joined together to spearhead the campaign.

“We’re thrilled to have an incredible group of filmmakers on board,” says Lisa Samford, Executive Director of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.

The campaign film features Oscar-winning Director Nick Park alongside Emmy winners Dereck and Beverly Joubert, acclaimed photographer Cristina Mittermeier, distinguished nature director Alastair Fothergill, pioneering cinematographers Louis Schwartzberg and S. Nallamuthu, renowned director/photographer and GoodPlanet founder Yann Arthus-Bertrand, and British film icon John Boorman with his son Charley, who is also a UNICEF ambassador.

Winning films from Forests for People will be premiered at the United Nations Forum on Forests conference in April 2013 in Istanbul, Turkey, and screened at events worldwide, including the 2013 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.

The initiative has been created by the creative agency/film production partnership of Traffic Concept and Film and Tomato, with footage and film resources provided by the National Geographic Society, BBC Motion Gallery and Footage Search, Inc.

For more information, and to submit entries, visit www.un.org/esa/forests/film/ [1].

Source: Aardman Animations