Mt. Airy founder's Film Festival (Virtual) Sept. 23 to 27

by Len Lear
Posted 9/25/20

Debra Wolf Goldstein, 58, grew up in Central Pennsylvania, where she spent many weekends camping and hiking the Appalachian trail and developing a lifelong love affair with nature. A graduate of …

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Mt. Airy founder's Film Festival (Virtual) Sept. 23 to 27

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Debra Wolf Goldstein, 58, grew up in Central Pennsylvania, where she spent many weekends camping and hiking the Appalachian trail and developing a lifelong love affair with nature. A graduate of Brown University and Georgetown University Law Center, she was determined to use the law not to protect the riches of large corporations but to protect the increasingly fragile and endangered environment.

“I became an environmentalist at a young age,” she said last week, “when a beautiful chestnut grove in my hometown was chopped down to build a parking lot. The Joni Mitchell song ('Big Yellow Taxi') literally came to life! I also saw unplanned, sprawling suburban development destroy many of the area’s beautiful vistas, so I was driven to work to protect nature in some way, although I didn’t know at the time how I’d make a living doing that.”

Goldstein, who has lived in West Mt. Airy for 19 years, first in a twin home near Weaver’s Way Co-op and now near Allens Lane Art Center, started her legal career at the Wolf Block firm doing environmental law, real estate and litigation. She then ran the southeast office of the PA Department of Conservation & Natural Resources’ Bureau of Recreation & Conservation and helped create the state’s first land trust grant program. 

She proceeded to serve as VP of a large regional land trust and hung out her own legal “shingle” after that, specializing in land conservation. Along the way she served as VP of the Fairmount Park Commission and then was appointed to Philadelphia’s Park & Recreation Commission, where she drafted the city’s first parkland protection ordinance.

Goldstein has been writing and teaching about environmental issues throughout her career but came to feel that film would be an even more powerful way to make these complex issues more accessible. “Well-made films create immediate emotional impact,” she said, so four years ago she co-founded (with Alexandra Diagne) the non-profit Philadelphia Environmental Film Festival to showcase new films that entertain, inform and inspire personal action. Their mission is to “bring the planet to Philadelphia through the power of environmental film.”

Needless to say, this year's film festival will not be like any others. Several thousand moviegoers have attended the festival in person each year since its founding, but this year the festival will be Virtual. The line-up showcases 50 new shorts and features from 19 countries, plus dozens of extras, like Q&As with filmmakers and panel discussions with scientists.

Tickets are $12 per film program or $30 for a Virtual Unlimited Pass that lets you see all the films and extras. Several of the programs are free. The Festival’s jury this year reviewed 310 film submissions from 43 countries. Goldstein and Diagne watched the highest-rated ones, selected the 50 they regarded as the best and arranged them into 13 thematic “programs.”

“We had to cancel our in-person 2020 April Festival just two weeks before it was scheduled to begin,” said Goldstein. “That was very difficult because we had already done all the work and had started selling tickets. Pivoting to a Virtual platform had its technical challenges, as you might imagine, but we did our research and found the best platform available for Virtual festivals. The silver lining is that our audience now is not limited by geography, and we are seeing ticket sales from all over the country. The directors also now are easily able to participate in Q&As virtually.”

The films that Goldstein has found the most compelling are “Mossville: When Great Trees Fall,” about one man’s brave fight against environmental racism (it also includes a panel discussion with the director and local thought leaders); “The Story of Plastic,” the real story of why we are awash in plastic trash (it includes a discussion with the director and a local Zero Waste activist); and “Sea of Shadows,” a real-life thriller about the fight to save the endangered Vaquita porpoise from an organized crime cartel.

Goldstein, who has a husband, Jay [who was the president of Valley Green Bank] and two grown children, is also a songwriter who won First Place in the American Songwriter Lyric Contest a few years ago and won a Gibson guitar. Her genre is Americana/folk. A few of her songs are on Sound Cloud under her stage name “Debra Kim Wolf.”

When asked “If you could meet and spend time with anyone on earth, living or dead, who would it be and why?” Goldstein replied, “I would spend one more day with my father, who passed away five years ago and was the smartest, most creative person I’ve ever met. He was a physicist who was working to develop the fusion reactor and also was an accomplished artist.”

Visit PhilaEnviroFilmFest.org for more information and tickets. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com