To celebrate the United Nations’ 2010 International Year of Biodiversity and promote the need for biodiversity conservation, the Environment Centre NT (ECNT) is running a novel short film competition to coincide with the Top End Sustainable Living Festival. This competition, badged ‘Wild NT’, aims to encourage students, teachers and the wider community to reflect on the subject of biodiversity, or the ‘web of life’, and capture it on film.

Here in the Northern Territory we are fortunate to be living in awe-inspiring landscapes and to be sharing our home with unique wildlife. We are also fortunate that Indigenous people have been active caretakers of country for thousands of years, and have valuable Traditional Ecological Knowledge to contribute to biodiversity conservation.

The competition poses the following challenge to budding film-makers: can you showcase an aspect of the Territory’s biodiversity and help people to discover and understand why it is important and how we are all connected with it? Basically the ECNT is seeking educational and inspiring films that weave a link between people, plants or animals, and place. There are two submission categories, schools and open, and films in Indigenous and other non-English languages are welcome. 

Great cash prizes are up for grabs: $2000 for winning entries and $1000 for runner up films. Category winners and runner ups will be announced and screened at the George Brown Botanic Gardens on June 5^th and 6^th 2010, as part of the Top End Sustainable Living Festival programme. Please contact Evy Magoulas for an application form and for the terms and conditions of entry, T: 08 8981 1984, E: communications@ecnt.org