Wild Awareness

Take a walk on the wild side… by attending one of the many public events planned during the Jackson Hole Wild Festival. Starting today at the Center for the Arts, the ambitious festival invites the community to experience the wide world of wildlife films. Tonight’s opening event portends the adventures to come throughout the week: the film on deck, “Unbranded,” follows four men as they travel from Mexico to Canada astride 16 wild mustangs.

New this year, the Wild Festival makes accessible the important discussions taking place at the more industry-centric the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, a well-established, well-respected contributor to the conservation circuit staged concurrently at Jackson Lake Lodge.A vibrant offshoot, the Wild Festival is “focused on issues that matter, stories that need telling and wildlife worth saving.”

With a jam-packed, star-studded roster of films and speakers, audiences will enjoy ample opportunities to educate themselves on conservation efforts around the global and close to home. Through staggered screenings (noon, 2, 4 and 7pm), each day of the eight-day festival explores a different theme from Elephants (Saturday, Sept. 26) to Big Cats (Wednesday, Sept. 30). Oftentimes, the people integral to the films’ production or plot will be present at the screenings. Wild highlights include the 3D screening of “Humpback Whales” followed by a conversation with famed underwater filmmakers Michelle and Howard Hall (on Sunday, Sept. 27) and the interview of Pulitzer Prize-winning sociobiologist E.O. Wilson by Kirk Johnson, head of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum (on Monday, Sept. 28).

The Wild Festival closes with a celebration of the National Park Service’s centennial on Friday, Oct. 3. The Party for our National Parks will screen all of the films that won awards at the Wildlife Film Festival, and conclude with the premiere of “Wild Yellowstone: Frozen Frontier,” a film produced by Jackson-based Brain Farm Digital Cinema for National Geographic. “Wild Yellowstone” grants rare access to the heroic adaptions of our wild neighbors.

At its core, the Wild Festival strives to inspire action in viewers by empowering them to make mindful changes in their daily lives. Or as film festival executive director Lisa Samford said in a Jackson Hole News&Guide article: “It challenges people to be more than who they are.”