TURIN: Earlier this week I spent a long and, in every sense of the word, sober lunch in a trattoria in Turin with fellow jury members at the world’s longest running environmental film festival, Cinemambiente, now in its 11th year. Each of us had dutifully watched the 10 shortlisted films, but how do you even begin to choose between films about, say, the societal and environmental influence of the new market economy in Mongolia, the imperialistic excesses of western gold miners in Guinea or the men who break up ships by hand on the oil-stained beaches of Bangladesh for a dollar a day?

After three hours of hearty, if sometimes circular, debate we finally settled on a winner. The Nuclear Comeback is a documentary by New Zealand filmmaker Justin Pemberton, weighing up the pros and cons of nuclear energy in a world that urgently needs to decarbonise its economy. On paper, this sounds quite a worthy film — dull, even — but Pemberton achieves a rare feat. God only knows how he persuaded them, but the authorities at Chernobyl allowed him to film inside the now abandoned, highly radioactive control room and inner core. It is thought to be the first time a western film crew has ever been allowed so far inside. In one angst-ridden scene, Pemberton turns to his guide and asks him whether it’s still safe to proceed when the radiation detector pinned to his jacket begins to bleep furiously. He is casually told to walk on.

Pemberton also manages to get nuclear officials in Britain to admit on film that no one really knows what to do with the spent nuclear fuel that will remain radioactive “for at least 100,000 years”. Yet equal time is given to those who argue that we don’t really have much choice now other than to go nuclear. Like the best documentaries, it is engaging, nuanced and avoids preaching its cause.

“Balance is everything,” says my fellow juror Ray McCormack, the Irish director of award-winning documentary A Crude Awakening: the Oil Crash. “It was far more effective getting someone from the industry spelling out the dangers of nuclear energy than someone from Greenpeace,” he says.

Other environmental films that have impressed McCormack include Workingman’s Death, The Future of Food and The Animals Film, which showed on Channel 4’s first night. “I’ve been a vegetarian ever since.”

Every film-maker wants the viewer to care passionately about their issue by the time the credits roll. But, sadly, good environmental films rarely make the light of day. At best, they are destined for a late-night slot on BBC4 — and that’s the successful ones.

“Every year I watch about 1,000 environmental shorts, animations and features from around the world before choosing the shortlist for my festival,” says Hey-Rim Hwang, programmer for the Green film festival in Seoul and another fellow juror. “I’ve seen them all — good, bad and ugly. Lots of western documentaries about the exploitation of natural resources in Africa, for example, are very one-dimensional. They don’t address the colonialistic attitudes of the exploiters.” Among the best she’s seen are When Clouds Clear, about a community in Ecuador battling copper miners, and Encounters at the End of the World by Werner Herzog. “Sadly, neither are that well-known to a wider public.”

Ask any cinema-goer to name their favourite environmental film, and you are unlikely to get much further than An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s Oscar-winning, yet deeply dividing film about global warming. It did a wonderful job in popularising the topic — hence the Nobel prize — but it hasn’t exactly led to a wave of environmental documentaries being signed up for distribution.

Some of the films with the most effective green messages, however, have been big-budget movies. Children and adults have lapped up Hollywood animations such as Happy Feet, Finding Nemo and Wall-E, without necessarily noticing that they are watching a powerful condemnation of, say, the damage industrial-scale trawlers are doing to global fish stocks.

Science fiction has also provided some strong environmental statements about where humanity might be headed if we don’t address some of today’s problems. I was transfixed by Logan’s Run as a child, and the bleak vision it painted of a world nearly destroyed by overpopulation and pollution. (A more influential film from the same era is Soylent Green.) The Day After Tomorrow might have been an often laughable Hollywood take on the perils of global warming, but it brought the issue to a wider audience than any political speech.

Hollywood has also successfully dramatised the real-life stories of those who have fought for environmental causes with films such as Erin Brockovich, The Emerald Forest, Born Free, Gorillas in the Mist and Silkwood.

But for me, the most powerful environmental film ever is an often-forgotten 1982 release with a near-unpronouncable title. Koyaanisqatsi, directed by Godfrey Reggio, shot by Ron Fricke and scored by Philip Glass, is a haunting meditation on the fraught relationship between humanity, technology and the natural environment. It combines striking imagery with a mind-changing message.Any good environmental film, as we discussed in Turin, must boast such qualities if it is to truly influence its audience.—Dawn/ Guardian News Service