As an audience of about a hundred watched Maja K. Mikkelsen’s film “The Last Observers,” a few wept at the scene of an elderly couple reminiscing on the life they had built with each other.
The film, one of 17 shown at the IU Cinema’s Earth Connection Film Festival on Wednesday, follows the couple who conduct weather observations and manage a bird observatory. Its overall message was to remind viewers of the joy found in nature.
The festival, hosted every two years, aims to curate innovative short films that address the environmental problems facing Earth to create an eco-friendly impact and inspire social change.
The festival was directed by Jessica Eise, a researcher, writer and assistant professor in environmental and occupational health at IU, and Sarah Lasley, an associate professor at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. In 2024, Lasley won the Audience Award at the Chicago Critics Film Festival for her short film “Welcome to the Enclave.”
The film festival is a part of a larger research project conducted at IU by Eise and Junghyun Moon, a Media School alum, titled “Retelling the Story: A Longitudinal Study Exploring How Tailored Moral, Ethical, and/or Spiritual Multimedia Narratives Influence Climate Change Mental Models.” This project received a grant from the National Science Foundation, and aims to examine how different storytelling approaches affect the way people perceive the threat of climate change.
Lasley and Eise founded and held the first Earth Connection Film Festival in July 2024 at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, screening 24 films and awarding $14,000 to the winning filmmakers.
Directors Jessica Eise and Sarah Lasley talk with the audience at the Earth Connection Film Festival on April 22, 2026, at the IU Cinema. The two held a Q&A panel after a screening of a program in the festival titled "Responsibility."
“One of the great things about this festival and this mission is that it has a real dedication to supporting environmental filmmakers, not only by sharing their work in this context, but also by putting actual money in their pockets,” Lasley said.
The films in the festival came from around the world, with stories filmed in places including Hawaii, Sweden and Chad.
The festival directors could source the films from such a broad background by putting out a callout on FilmFreeway, a site where filmmakers can submit their films to festivals across the globe. They also contacted universities and sent special invitations to creators whose films were submitted at other festivals.
The films were organized into three groups that covered three different themes, and each group was presented at a different time during the day of the festival. The themes, which carried over from 2024’s festival, originated from social scientific research Eise conducted a few years ago. As a part of this research, she conducted a survey of about 270 U.S. adults and analyzed the primary themes running through the broad American consciousness when asked about nature.
“That’s where these concepts of responsibility, interdependence, and hope rose to the surface,” Eise said.
Chase Martin, a Bloomington local who takes interest in film as well as climate change, attended the festival. He liked how “The Last Observers” tied personal stories into environmental issues.
“There was that idea that you can’t separate human lives from the biodiversity that’s happening around us,” Martin said. “I just feel like it resonates when we tell the human story instead of just the data.”
