The Arizona Science Center hosted the final night of the inaugural SkyFire Environmental Film Festival Sunday March 28.

The festival was founded to promote sustainability and spotlight solutions to protect the environment worldwide..

“What we quickly realized when traveling all over the world with Urban Farming Education is there’s a lot of great resources,” said festival co-founder Joe Roselle. “There’s a lot of great stories, and we wanted to find a vehicle to tell stories and raise awareness.”

Over 200 films from 50 countries were submitted to the festival, many created by young filmmakers.

“100 of them were kids from 10-year-olds to college,” Roselle said. “It shattered my impression of what their age group could do.”

The festival formed a committee to help choose which films would be screened, and it kept a specific goal in mind when selecting them.

“We really picked the best environmental films,” Roselle said. “We partnered with Perennial Films, which has experience with documentaries, so they helped guide us to pick the best films.”

Those present at the festival had the opportunity to view the selected films, including “Fork in the Road,” a documentary film that told the stories of different farmers across the United States.

“It’s all about the workarounds,” said film director Vivian Sorenson. “‘Fork in the Road’ follows the story of six farmers who found workarounds to a large, industrial culture.”

Sorenson and her team faced many challenges during the documentary’s production, which took them eight years to complete.

“We sometimes were just a crew of three,” Sorenson said. “That’s a lot of giving up and sacrificing.”

Despite the difficulties she faced during production, Sorenson enjoyed seeing people experience the film for the first time and said she was proud of the final product.

“I’m still so in the moment of experiencing people seeing it for the first time,” Sorenson said. “It’s so cool to see people lean in.”