The home of the Wild & Scenic Film Festival, a program of the South Yuba River Citizens League, lies within the vibrant Yuba River Watershed—a living ecosystem where spring brings an essential transformation. As wildflowers bloom and landscapes awaken, pollinators take center stage, quietly sustaining the health of the watershed and the biodiversity that defines our region.
Each May, as bees, butterflies, birds, and other pollinators return in full force, our community is reminded that even the smallest creatures play an outsized role in the resilience of our environment. Supporting pollinators means supporting clean water, thriving plant life, and the interconnected systems that make places like the Yuba River so special.
To honor this seasonal shift, we’ve curated a short playlist of prior Wild & Scenic Official Selections that celebrate pollinators, biodiversity, and the people working to protect these essential species and habitats:
Aiden’s Butterflies (2018)
A Ghost in the Making: Searching for the Rusty-patched Bumble Bee (2016)
My Garden of a Thousand Bees (2021)
AIDEN’S BUTTERFLIES
Brad Mays, Olga Talyn | 2018 | 14 min.
2019 Official Selection
Meet 11-year-old Aiden Wang, who has been growing milkweed and harboring and releasing Monarch Butterflies since he was 6 years old. We join Aiden in a journey ranging from nature preserves to city streets as he meets new friends and asks us all to help preserve the endangered beautiful monarch butterfly with its dependence on the diminishing supply of milkweed.
A GHOST IN THE MAKING: SEARCHING FOR THE RUSTY-PATCHED BUMBLE BEE
Neil Losin, Morgan Heim, Clay Bolt, Nate Dappen | 2016 | 19 min.
2017 Official Selection
Everyone has heard about bee declines, but with so much attention focused on domesticated honeybees, someone has to speak up for the 4,000 species of native bees in North America. Natural history photographer Clay Bolt is on a multi-year quest to tell the stories of our native bees, and one elusive species – the Rusty-patched Bumble Bee – has become his white whale.
MY GARDEN OF A THOUSAND BEES
David Allen, Gaby Bastyra, Martin Dohrn, David Guy Elisco, Sean B. Carroll, Fred Kaufman, Bill Murphy | 2021 | 52 min.
2022 Official Selection
Rame Peninsula Beach Care wanted to pick up every piece of rubbish from a small cove, sort it, count it and see how long it took to fill up again. This film was made with the local beach cleaning organisation trying to grapple with the amount of marine pollution on their local Cornish beaches. The results shocked everyone involved and the film caught the attention of BBC Spotlight and The Sunday Times with articles in the paper and online.
