[1][2][3][4] The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival was launched in 1997 as an outreach project from the Center for the Environment at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
[5] Always dedicated to films with a message, the festival, under program director Christopher Riley, expanded to become a major regional event in upstate New York.
In 2005 the festival moved permanently to Ithaca College, where it is housed in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies as a program to link intellectual inquiry and debate to larger global issues.
[6] In recent years, FLEFF moved toward incorporating new media[7] as yet another platform to interrogate sustainability across all of its forms: economic, social, ecological, political, cultural, technological, and aesthetic.
[8] This initiative has redefined and expanded environmental issues to explore the international interconnections between war, air, disease, the land, health, water, genocide, food, education, technology, cultural heritage, and diversity.