New York to go wild with the NY WILD Film Festival

The historic Explorers Club Headquarters in the Big Apple may not look exciting from the outside, but things are set to go wild there this January with the 2016 NY WILD Film Festival scheduled on January 28-31.

Now in its third year, the event spotlights films on exploration, adventure, wildlife and environmental genres. It will also honor auteur Jonathan Demme for his recent documentary work.

The festival also celebrates the filmmakers who– through incredible storytelling-promote awareness, educate, and inspire interest in exploring and conserving the natural world around us.

More importantly, the NY WILD Film Festival presents a unique opportunity to exchange ideas, affect vital change and celebrate the wild.

NY WILD Film Festival to honor Jonathan Demme

This year, renowned director Jonathan Demme, who is best known for making The Silence of the Lambs, will receive the award for Best Conservation Hero Film for his documentary What’s Moving Hayes.

The documentary is about Tyrone Hayes, a Berkeley biologist who found himself a target of the agribusiness giant Syngenta. Why? Because his research linked atrazine– one of the most widely used herbicides- to changes in frogs’ reproductive organs. It didn’t help that Syngenta had commissioned his work.

Meru, the winner of the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at Sundance and short-listed recently for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature, will also be screened.

This documentary is about three elite climbers who struggle to find their way through obsession and loss as they attempt to climb Mount Meru, one of the most coveted prized in the high stakes game of Himalayan big wall climbing.

Other features at the NY WILD Film Festival

NY WILD will feature around 20 film screenings each day, audience Q&A’s, panel discussions, receptions and award presentations. In addition to all day screenings, the Club will host a luncheon with fellow adventurers and offer once-in-a-lifetime special social and networking events.

The event offers film and adventure enthusiasts– as well as armchair travellers– an insider’s look at the exhilarating world of adventure and wildlife cinema by showcasing the best films from across the globe that explore such vital concepts as conservation, discovery and respect for the planet.

“The 2016 festival promises to be our most exciting yet, with an array of diverse films that allow the viewer to vicariously experience all the wonder the world has to offer, while meeting some of the world’s most creative, adventurous and heroic earth-loving individuals, ” said Nancy Rosenthal, filmmaker and founder and executive director of NY WILD.

The NY WILD Film Festival is sponsored by National Geographic, The University of Miami, Exploration Science, The Explorers Club and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), with additional support from The North Face, 18 Rabbits, Born to Explore, and New York Women in Film & Television.