This article looks at the All Living Things Environmental Film Festival 2025, focusing on its decentralised 'host your own screening' model, its new curated Watch Party bundles, and the launch of its immersive experience GIANTS. It also highlights the festival’s expanding development platforms, including the Mongabay × ALT EFF masterclass and the Green Stories Film Fund, along with year-round programming through the ALT EFF Film Club.
For its 2025 edition, the All Living Things Environmental Film Festival is expanding far beyond the idea of a conventional film festival. Instead of anchoring itself in a single city or relying exclusively on theatrical premieres, ALT EFF has spent the past few years building an ecosystem of formats, community tools and original IPs designed to rethink how environmental narratives travel. The 2025 programme sharpens that approach through new ways of participating, hosting, learning and experiencing stories.
At the centre of this shift is ALT EFF’s decentralised model — a hybrid structure that blends virtual streaming with locally hosted events across India. The festival’s 'host your own screening' initiative formalises what many grassroots groups had been doing informally: gathering friends, neighbourhoods or entire communities to watch and discuss films together. Now, anyone can register as a host, receive access to the festival library, organise their own event, ticket it (or not), pair it with workshops, talks or neighbourhood clean-ups, and shape the format to fit their context. For 2025, ALT EFF has expanded this further with curated Watch Party bundles such as 'Stealing Giants', 'The Last Garden', and 'Waste and the City' — ready-made thematic packs that help hosts build meaningful local conversations without needing programming experience.
This decentralised approach is complemented by a growing slate of original festival experiences that travel with ALT EFF, shaping its identity beyond the annual line-up. The most notable this year is GIANTS, an exclusive immersive experience that reframes our relationship to scale by placing viewers inside a constructed world. Described as a transportive encounter into ancient forests, GIANTS pairs large-format imagery with an enveloping soundscape to build a sensory, world-making experience that sits between documentary, installation art and ecological education.
ALT EFF 2025 also intensifies its relationship with live, on-ground programming. Beyond its partnerships with cultural organisations across the country, the festival is anchoring this year’s edition in a series of clearly defined, city-led events and development platforms. These include the Mongabay × ALT EFF masterclass on environmental video journalism, which focuses on evidence-based storytelling, nonfiction techniques and combating misinformation, along with a linked video-reporting opportunity that supports participants in producing publishable, impact-driven work.
The festival’s Green Stories Film Fund continues to grow as one of its strongest development arms, offering a mentorship-led pitch lab, production guidance, and a major co-production award that helps early-stage projects move toward completion and eventual festival premieres.
Across partner venues, the programme opens out into full-day community experiences — panel conversations, filmmaker Q&As, handicraft and photography workshops, live music sessions, farm-to-fork gatherings, pub-quiz nights, and field excursions with naturalists and researchers. Masterclasses and reporting opportunities extend the festival’s reach into journalism and nonfiction practice, while the fund provides structural support for filmmakers at the earliest stages of their projects. Rather than positioning itself only as a destination for finished films, ALT EFF is steadily becoming a pipeline for new environmental media.
Holding all of this together is a commitment to year-round engagement. The ALT EFF Film Club, now active across multiple cities, hosts monthly screenings and gatherings that keep momentum alive even after the festival week ends. With its climate storytelling as something that gains power through circulation, ALT EFF is edging toward a civic model of environmental media, one where stories, skills and resources move horizontally through classrooms, community groups and cultural partners rather than through a single institutional gateway. It is an approach that understands environmental storytelling as something to be shared, hosted, built, and lived collectively.
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