See Positive Change and Trees & Seas Film Festival: film as a catalyst for environmental action
- Editorial Team SDG17
- 7 hours ago
- 7 min read
Published on 18 May 2026 at 03:48 GMT
By Editorial Team SDG17
In contemporary environmental work, one of the central questions is no longer simply how to raise public awareness. For decades, campaigns, documentaries, scientific reports and social movements have helped bring issues such as plastic pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, water security and the circular economy into public debate. The evidence is widely available, the language is familiar, and solutions are emerging across different regions of the world. What is often missing is coordination.
This is where the recent evolution of the work connected to Plastic Oceans becomes especially relevant. The organisation, originally recognised for its focus on plastic pollution, is moving towards a broader understanding of environmental challenges. Plastic remains one of the most visible signs of a deeper crisis, but it is no longer treated as an isolated issue. It is connected to production systems, waste management, urban planning, water security, marine protection, supply chains, public policy and economic behaviour.
This transition from awareness to coordination is particularly clear in See Positive Change (SPC), a film library that has recently been moved out of the main Plastic Oceans site. The decision was structural rather than thematic. Keeping systems-linked films inside a single-issue organisation risked suggesting that every film was simply about plastic. In reality, many of the stories deal with wider systems: water, livelihoods, governance, indigenous knowledge, coastal communities, circularity and the relationships between actors who often work separately.
SPC is therefore more than a digital film platform. It is a tool for understanding connections. Its purpose is not only to present films to inform a passive audience, but to organise stories in a way that helps viewers recognise patterns. A film about a river can also speak about agriculture, drought, policy, cultural memory and ecosystem restoration. A story about a coastal community can reveal the relationship between tourism, fishing, climate risk and traditional knowledge. A film about fashion can open a wider conversation about synthetic fibres, waste, labour, identity, consumption, design and global trade.
This approach changes the role of environmental film. A documentary is no longer only an instrument of denunciation or awareness. It becomes a point of encounter. Its value lies not only in what appears on screen, but in the conversations it makes possible afterwards. When a community, school, organisation, company, public authority or research group gathers around the same story, a shared language can begin to emerge. That shared language does not remove conflict, but it can expose the differences in priorities, misunderstandings and hidden barriers that often block solutions already known to exist.
Many environmental problems do not persist because there are no solutions at all. They persist because systems are misaligned. There are technologies for waste collection, alternative materials, restoration models, reuse schemes, monitoring tools and communities willing to act. But each part of the system often speaks from its own position. Policymakers look for scale and legitimacy. Finance looks for manageable risk. Communities look for continuity, justice and practical benefit. Businesses look for economic viability. Scientists look for accuracy. Film can act as an initial mediator, not because it replaces research or public policy, but because it creates a shared experience from which a more useful conversation can begin.
This becomes even more important in the dialogue work associated with film. Experience suggests that film can bring different stakeholder groups into the same room on a more equal footing. A screening does not solve a crisis by itself, but it can change the starting point. Instead of beginning with technical reports, institutional positions or closed agendas, participants begin from a human story. From there, structured dialogue can reveal forms of misalignment that may have remained invisible: policies that do not translate locally, solutions that fail to reach the people who need them, innovations that lack institutional channels, or financial mechanisms that do not fit real conditions on the ground.
The next step is to translate those misalignments into useful knowledge for institutions, funders, policymakers and supply chain actors. If several communities identify the same obstacle, if organisations encounter a recurring regulatory gap, or if an innovation cannot scale because the financial conditions are wrong, that information can become actionable. In that sense, SPC points towards a more sophisticated function for film: not only to inspire, but to help generate collective intelligence.
The second expression of this methodology is the Trees & Seas Film Festival, a festival that moves away from the conventional cultural model. Instead of concentrating attention in one city, one venue and one fixed audience window, Trees & Seas operates as a distributed festival. Its format combines online access with in-person events organised in multiple communities.
This structure is not just a logistical choice. It is part of the message. The festival does not simply bring films to different locations. It allows each host community to adapt the programme to its own conditions. The same film can generate different conversations in a coastal town, a school, a rural community, a youth organisation, a cultural space or a restoration project. In this way, the festival itself becomes an example of the methodology it promotes: moving from centralised communication towards locally grounded coordination.
Trees & Seas presents film as a way of turning stories into action. Its model brings together filmmakers, creatives and communities to explore practical ways of building a more circular, resilient and connected world. The focus is not only on watching films, but on using them as catalysts for local dialogue, interpretation and response.
The 2026 edition is organised around the theme “Fashion as a System”, also presented as “Fabrics of Change: Fashion as a System”. This choice expands the usual boundaries of environmental storytelling. Fashion is not approached only as a creative industry or a matter of personal consumption, but as a system that connects identity, materials, water, labour, waste, culture, transport, coastal pollution and ecosystem health.
The question behind the theme is direct: what would happen if fashion were designed as an ecosystem? This question exposes one of the central contradictions of the sector. Fashion has enormous cultural influence, yet it also reflects many of the pressures of the current economic model. A single garment may contain cotton grown in one region, synthetic fibres derived from fossil fuels, dyes affecting water systems, labour distributed across global supply chains, international shipping, branding, retail and, eventually, waste. By following these threads, the festival invites audiences to look beyond the label and consider how the system itself could be redesigned.
The official 2026 selection catalogue shows this systemic approach clearly. The films are linked to the Sustainable Development Goals and organised around themes such as oceans and marine life, rivers and water, forests and ecosystems, fashion and textiles, indigenous and ancestral knowledge, plastic and waste, innovation and the circular economy, and climate crisis and systems.
Among the selected films, The Moken Ocean Guardians focuses on the Moken, a nomadic sea people living around the Andaman Sea off Thailand and Myanmar. The film connects indigenous knowledge, marine protection, tourism, climate pressure and the transmission of traditional wisdom to younger generations.
The Monster in Our Closet examines the relationship between clothing, fossil fuels and plastic pollution. It places fashion within a wider industrial system, showing how performance fabrics, consumption habits and the oil and gas economy are connected.
La Voz en el Mar follows a young surfer on the Mexican coast, where the beauty of the ocean exists alongside the constant presence of plastic waste. The film links ocean pollution with personal responsibility, nature connection and community action.
Return: Saving Turtles tells the story of a family of former sea turtle egg poachers who become protectors of an endangered species in Oaxaca, Mexico. It shows how environmental transition can happen when communities are trusted as active participants rather than treated only as recipients of external rules.
Muga: When She Stops Flowing, So Will We looks at the Muga River in Spain, from the Pyrenees to the Costa Brava. Through drought, monocultures and ecosystem decline, the film reflects on water security, climate change and the urgent need to listen to river systems before they collapse.
The theme of fashion is especially present in Shiringa: Fashion Regenerating Amazonia, set in the Peruvian Amazon. The film follows an indigenous community developing a biomaterial alternative to animal and synthetic leather. It links biodiversity, forest conservation, indigenous knowledge and sustainable design.
The Green Buffalo expands the conversation through a story from the United States, where a Sioux community develops bio-based building materials. The film connects housing, territory, indigenous knowledge, social impact and the possibility of industrial alternatives rooted in local resources.
In I Was a Sari, discarded saris are transformed into new fashion products in India. The story links circular design with women’s empowerment, community, dignity and the idea that waste can become a source of beauty and opportunity.
Other works in the programme, including Gutli Man and Valencia’s The City That Fuels Sustainable Change, broaden the frame beyond fashion. They address reforestation, food waste, urban innovation and community-led environmental solutions. Together, these films show that while fashion is the central theme of the 2026 edition, the festival remains committed to a wider understanding of systems and interdependence.
As a whole, the selection confirms that Trees & Seas does not treat fashion as a closed subject. Fashion becomes an entry point into water, forests, waste, fossil fuels, indigenous cultures, inequality, design and the circular economy. This mirrors the wider shift represented by See Positive Change: environmental issues cannot be fully understood when they are separated from the systems that produce them.
The journalistic value of this approach lies in the way it moves the environmental conversation beyond individual guilt and towards the architecture of systems. Consumers still have responsibility, but they cannot solve industrial-scale problems alone. Local communities can lead important responses, but they also need funding channels, institutional recognition, legal tools and collaborative networks. Film can open the door to that understanding because it allows audiences to see people, places, consequences and alternatives at the same time.
This is why both SPC and Trees & Seas point towards a more mature form of environmental communication. Awareness remains necessary, but it is no longer enough. The next step is to turn attention into dialogue, dialogue into coordination, and coordination into verifiable change. The aim is not to abandon emotion, but to organise it. It is not to replace denunciation, but to connect it with possible routes for action.
In a world shaped by overlapping crises, this kind of work offers a concrete contribution. Film cannot replace public policy, climate finance, corporate regulation or scientific innovation. But it can create the cultural conditions for these tools to meet. It can show that plastic pollution is not just waste, but a symptom. That a garment is not just a product, but a chain of relationships. That a local community is not just an audience, but a source of knowledge. And that a film, when placed in the right setting, can become the beginning of a conversation that did not previously exist.
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