SYRCL’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival Releases Limited Number of Early Bird Passes and Preview of 2025 Film Selections  

SYRCL’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival has announced a preview of its 2025 lineup of environmental and adventure films to be shown at its 23rd annual event happening February 13-17, 2025.  The film lineup preview – listed below and online – includes films such as Flight of the Swans, Cigarette Surfboard, and A Call from the Wild. Festival passes with special early bird pricing are now on sale. A limited number of these specially priced passes are available through December 12th or as quantities allow. The full lineup of films will be released in mid-December along with additional regularly priced passes and tickets.  

For over two decades, the Wild & Scenic Film Festival has welcomed audiences to the towns of Grass Valley and Nevada City in the beautiful foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains for its flagship event. During Presidents Day weekend, February 13-17, the festival takes over the towns.  

The festival is not only about first-class films, it also features a variety of events, such as activist workshops, an art exhibition in partnership with the Nevada County Arts Council, youth programs serving 4,000 students from local and regional schools, the EnviroFair, filmmaker Q&A sessions, as well as opportunities to interact with filmmakers and special guests. In its 23rd year, the Wild & Scenic Film Festival continues to bring together top filmmakers, activists, and social innovators to inspire environmental awareness and action.  

This year’s festival theme, “Wild at Heart,” speaks to the power of wild places to spark inspiration, compassion, and understanding of the world around us. Wild is a natural state and place of inspiration, particularly for this festival. With a nod to the festival’s namesake, created in celebration of SYRCL’s landmark victory to earn “Wild & Scenic” status for 39 miles of the South Yuba River, the 2025 theme encourages us all to work to stay wild in ways that enrich us and our surroundings.  The theme also embraces a multitude of meanings of “heart”.  The official 2025 artwork – created by woodcut artist Nick Wroblewski – celebrates these ideas, and audiences can expect to see it reflected throughout this year’s programming.   

To learn more and purchase passes or tickets, visit WSFF.eventive.org. Stay tuned for the full lineup of films to be announced in December.   

Some of the marquee films presented at the 23rd Annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival include:  

Flight of the Swans – A female conservationist takes to the skies in a paramotor to follow Bewick’s Swans on their annual migration in a bid to understand their dramatic decline; 7,000 kilometers, 11 countries, from Russia to England across tundra, forests, and industrial landscapes, where she encounters people just as passionate about saving and protecting these birds and their wetland homes. Narrated by Academy Award nominee Sophie Okonedo. 

Mollies Pack – On January 12, 1995, wolves returned to Yellowstone, 50 years after their extirpation.  Mollie Beattie, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, carried the first Canadian born wolf into The Park’s experimental acclimation enclosure, Alpha Female Wolf No. 5.  From that day forward, their lives would be forever connected.  This is the true story of Mollie’s Pack and the return of wolves to the World’s First National Park. 

Cigarette Surfboard – An impassioned surfer creates a functional surfboard with 10,000 littered cigarette butts collected from California beaches. The surfboard becomes a global platform to spark ocean stewardship and the symbol of a grassroots campaign to hold Big Tobacco accountable for their toxic, plastic waste. 

A Radical Thread – The San Juan Ridge Community in the Sierra Foothills has survived countless threats during its 50-year history including mining, logging and arson.  Established by artists and ecologists in the 1970’s, this thriving group now faces their most monumental challenge to date – wildfire and drought caused by climate change.  

For seventeen years hundreds of volunteers stitched the stories of their struggles and celebrations into 12 tapestry panels that total 83 feet.  A Radical Thread is a feature documentary film that chronicles the community’s ethos of collectivism, play, and sustainability as visualized in the making of the tapestry, and explores how the elders pass their values to the next generations who are confronting the threat of wildfire through their newest cooperative endeavor, Force of Nature Forestry. 

A Call from the Wild – Filmmaker Asgeir Helgestad documents the state of nature in his home country, Norway, where he has photographed all his life. From the lives of bees on his farm, to wild reindeer on the high mountains and puffins at the ocean’s edge, he shows the beauty of threatened nature and tracks down human actions responsible for its decline. This is a personal story on our connection with the non-human world, the relations between the small and the big, and a reminder of nature’s strength and vulnerability.