Chinese environmental films trying to bring viewers closer to nature are struggling to win the attention game.
Last year, a short play in a Chinese variety show sparked debate. The Sheep Comes! seemed to be an absurdist sketch with talking animals firing off one-liners and rapid retorts. But it reached into more serious themes, including animals’ changed behaviour in nature reserves and how humanity and wildlife relate to each other.
This is not something commonly seen in China. Art with nature-related themes abound, but film and performance pieces exploring environmental topics are rare. All you’ll find on the subject in mainstream channels are official news reports and analysis of the “dual carbon” goals. The situation is different overseas. Last year, a play about the 1997 Kyoto climate talks ran in London’s West End. In 2023, a production depicting reflections and anxieties about the climate crisis debuted in Australia, with a Singapore adaptation.
Some people are trying to fill this gap, including Ding Dawei, who founded the Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF) in 2017. The festival includes environmentally themed works in its programming, and has since 2023 maintained a dedicated environmental section, hoping to attract new audiences with films responding to the times.
Dialogue Earth interviewed Ding, as well as Wang Jue, a public and culture campaign specialist at Greenpeace’s Beijing office, to find out about the role film is playing in communicating climate and environmental issues in China.
What’s right vs what’s easy
In 2025, there were 23 films shown under BISFF’s environmental section, “Future Ethics”. One story, My Name is Oil, is told in the voice of an offshore drilling rig. Another is about a woman who leaves the city to spend time with a tree, and writes a journal documenting it. A film about traditional willow weaving, shot on Super 8, explores how crafts rely on natural materials.
“A wide variety of people came to watch the environmental films, including young people from big internet firms and older retirees,” Ding notes. He chose the films based on a gap he had noticed. Over the past ten years, films coming out of Europe and the US were focusing more and more on the changes the Earth is going through, as well as ecosystem relationships and silence on climate issues. An increasing number of works were re-examining how people and nature relate, but these themes were still considered niche in China.
Ding thinks people are realising the importance of protecting the environment but finding it hard to act in their already busy lives. “Everyone knows excessive packaging is a form of waste, but when you’re rushed, takeaway food wrapped up in plastic bags and boxes remains the easiest option.”
He says that disconnect comes down to a lack of real-life experience. “You need to go touch a tree. Feel a cow’s breath, feel its heartbeat. Only when you have that lived experience, rather than just ideals, will your thinking change.” Films can come closer to providing that lived experience.
The festival team prepared some “climate postcards” to get attendees to stop and think. The question on the most popular postcard, the one which brought the biggest response, was: “Does picking up a camera and filming nature mean you have changed nature?” Feedback received by the BISFF team discussed in detail the conflict between the “eternity of film” and “the limited Earth”.
In search of micro-narratives
A line in a famous Chinese road comedy film goes: “I’ve heard all the advice and I still can’t live right.” Chinese audiences have a similar attitude to nature and climate topics. BISFF used a popular online joke as the title of one of its social media posts: “Never mind zero carbon, I’m struggling to get to zero stress.”
Ding said that too much of the discussion around environmental topics is confined to professional circles: “The public know how important it is, but they struggle to access those circles and can’t participate in the debate or the action.”
This year’s BISFF is being held in partnership with Greenpeace’s Beijing office. Wang Jue of Greenpeace told Dialogue Earth she thinks narratives that focus on life instead of national policy are vital to reduce people’s sense of alienation from environmental topics. “Climate change is often seen as something political and technical, happening over long timescales in faraway places. People feel it has nothing to do with them. By focusing on specific stories and details, films can create direct links between the topic and people’s lives and cultural identities.”
One example is The Tigress of Manchuria, from Chinese director Huang Jiayi. The film connects the lives and cultures of the people of the north-east with the local tiger population as it retraces the route of a Russian author in exile.
Wang also points out that in the past, short environmental films tended to hold up examples to be followed. But a heroic tale of someone spending decades planting trees or saving wildlife only has brief motivational value. They create concern but no action, as audiences quickly return to their – very different – day-to-day lives. Film should reflect the complexities of reality, with ordinary people telling relatable stories to create empathy and longer lasting conversations, Wang says.
She also mentions some more down-to-earth climate content that Chinese audiences have taken to: global warming’s impact on the prices of coffee and lemons, and how it extends the pollen season; the impact of the shifting seasons on agriculture; the dangers delivery riders face working during extreme weather events; and the damage humidity causes to cultural heritage sites.
The fight for attention
When it comes to mass audiences, the climate still has to fight it out with other economic and cultural issues.
Open a social media app or site and you’ll find pages filled with posts about luxury lifestyles and adverts for all kinds of products, telling stories of how to be a better you. Those might bring momentary intrigue, but they also increase the longing for a life that is faster and more optimised – and, accordingly, more anxiety-filled.
Asked how to combat that type of excessive consumption, Wang says people need to draw energy from nature and choose a simpler and more environmentally friendly lifestyle. That energy can also come from short films: one of those showing at BISFF, Fabulous Cow Ladies, chronicles three generations of cows being tenderly cared for by three women vets. “From nature we can draw simpler, more basic experiences.”
But the dazzling array of information we are presented with in our daily lives makes it harder for us to make our own choices. Getting away from the screen and into nature is no easy task for most.
Looking for discussion on the BISFF environmental section on social media is also disappointing – there is barely any. One audience member told Dialogue Earth: “I was really interested in the environmental section, but I missed it. I hope to catch it next time.” That person, along with others who posted online, were more interested in films in the feminist and international competition sections.
The festival reflects real life: when there are so many pressing issues to worry about, the climate and nature are always told to wait their turn.
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