Red flags amid the green shoots that hint at no recovery

Three films, three themes, one festival. This year Leeds’s Hyde Park Picture House is the only Yorkshire venue to be hosting elements of the annual UK Green Film Festival. And the impactful nature of the trio of documentaries – Trashed (Monday, June 3), Peak (Thursday, June 6) and More Than Honey (Saturday, June 8) – ensures that this is a touring programme not to be missed.

Jeremy Irons criss-crosses the world to host director Candida Brady’s Trashed, which examines the global waste problem and highlights how our predilection for throwing away, burning or burying our rubbish will eventually consume our planet.

Peak is a companion piece to Trashed. Hennes Lang’s film chronicles how Earth’s mountains are being augmented and steadily altered to please the needs of tourists who yearn to witness and immerse themselves in an idealised landscape.

Markus Imhoof’s More Than Honey is a bee-friendly biopic of the under-threat industrious creatures as seen via a focus on the bee industry in the United States, Switzerland, China and Australia.

This is the third year that the Hyde Park has partnered with the festival and whilst the complete line-up of seven titles is not being presented, the choice of what is being screened is impeccable.

General manager Wendy Cook says the event’s aspirations to “entertain, challenge and inspire” chime with the cinema’s aims “so we’re really proud to have been involved in the festival since its inception in 2011”.

Sponsored by Friends of the Earth, the UK Green Film Festival champions causes and masterful documentary filmmaking. In fact, given the spread of themed documentaries from filmmakers with clearly defined agendas, we may even be entering a golden era for the documentary form.

Where once the documenting of our planet’s woes was the territory of Godfrey (Koyaanisqatsi) Reggio, Ron (Baraka) Fricke and their ilk, the line-up at the UK Green Film Festival shows how much more active and passionate today’s filmmakers have become.

A common theme is red flag waving: films acting as a hoarse tenor note of controlled panic as they warn of the dreadful consequences to come in our lifetime if action is not taken to stem what is being recorded.

Mankind slowly choking under its own manufactured waste. Our global bee population struggling to survive. The natural orology of our planet being reconfigured for the purpose of here-today, gone-tomorrow aesthetics.

Forty years ago writers like Harry Harrison were warning of the dread effects of over-population, over-fishing, mass extinction of whole species and the potential for a dying planet in books like Make Room! Make Room!

But what was once dystopian sci-fi is rapidly becoming unpalatable fact. Hollywood turned Harrison’s book into a prime slice of futureshock called Soylent Green. Four decades later sci-fi is emerging as fact, pure and simple. Too many people, too many mouths to feed, one small planet. We’re consuming ourselves while the camera rolls.

The UK Green Film Festival runs from June 1-8. 0113 275 2045. www.ukgreenfilmfestival.org