Wild and Scenic
Nevada City and Grass Valley, California recently held their 21st edition of the community’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival—an event inspiring environmental activism and a love of nature through film. The annual event that features films, workshops, visiting filmmakers and activist talks, family-friendly programs, art exhibitions, parties and more is the largest annual fundraiser for the South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL). Locally the festival raises funds and awareness to recover California’s wild salmon and protect the Yuba River watershed.
Founded in 1983, the SYRCL (pronounced circle) was founded by grassroots activists intent on protecting the South Yuba River from dams. Their efforts won permanent protection for 39 miles of the South Yuba River under California’s Wild and Scenic Rivers Act from which the film festival takes it name.
For 16 years Kit and I were volunteers at the True/False International Film Festival in Columbia, MO. After moving to Nevada City in April 2021, it was thrilling to learn we would once again be a part of an inclusive, vibrant community that hosts an international film festival. After settling in, we began exploring our new community and looked forward to attending the Wild & Scenic film festival in February 2022. Unfortunately, due to COVID restrictions in place, festival organizers were unable to host in-person events at local venues that year.
This year from February 16-20, 2023 the Wild & Scenic Film Festival once again hosted five days of events and films. The final night of the festival we joined our neighbors Carol and Jim at the historic Nevada Theater for the festival’s popular “Local’s Night Award Winners” event—a selection of five award winning documentary films. It was grand to be downtown that night and finally be able to see the interior of the Nevada Theater that celebrated its 100th birthday in 1965.
The theater’s survival after hard times is due in part to the efforts of Dr. Leland and Sally Lewis—a couple who retired in Nevada City from Bakersfield in 1963. Sally was a charter member of the Nevada City Liberal Arts Commission formed to save the Nevada Theater from demolition. Also known as the Cedar Theater, the imposing red-brick structure is California’s oldest existing theater building. During its storied history, the theater hosted an impressive cast of celebrities on its stage, including humorist Mark Twain, novelist Jack London and Emma Nevada—known as the “Nightingale of the Comstock” who once sang for Queen Victoria.
On a walk through the historic downtown in the summer of 2021, Kit and I discovered a plaque affixed to an outside wall of the Nevada Theater. Reading the inscription, we learned that on April 27, 1974, the theater was designated a California Historical Landmark because of the efforts of the town’s Liberal Arts Commission and the leadership of local citizens including Leland and Sally Lewis. We had hoped to see the theater’s interior that day, but the theater was closed to the public due to an extraordinary project underway inside.
As it turned out, the pandemic that was keeping the theater closed was the perfect time for mural artist Sarah Coleman to envision and create a monumental mural spanning the entire auditorium of the Nevada Theater. A year ago, mural artists Sarah Coleman, Miles Toland and Brianna French were awarded the Dr. Leland and Sally Lewis Award for Visual Arts by the Nevada City Chamber of Commerce “in honor of their contribution to the community and efforts to make the world a better place.”
Until Kit and I attended the Wild & Scenic local’s event at the Nevada Theater on the festival’s final night, I hadn’t comprehended the monumental scale of the project these three gifted muralists undertook. Once inside the auditorium’s dazzling interior, we instantly felt at home in the company of fellow film festival goers and marveled at the beauty of the cultural heritage expressed in the murals that surrounded us.
As the festival’s director took the stage, she reminded the audience that the SYRCL who help sponsor the annual event works throughout the Yuba River watershed on the Ancestral and Traditional homelands of the Nisenan Tribe, and includes shared boundaries with the Mountain Maidu, Konkow, and Washoe peoples who lived here for millennia and some who still do whose stories inspired the murals. After “acknowledging and mourning the painful history of genocide and devastation of lands and waters irreversibly altered,” the festival’s director reminded the audience, “We are grateful for opportunities to partner with the tribes to create a shared vision and rebalance our relationship to this place.”
That vision is at the heart of the Wild & Scenic International Film Festival’s local mission expressed in the murals that now grace the walls and ceiling of the Nevada Theater. “A Vision of Here”—a 10-minute video by filmmaker Yasha Aginsky—follows the inception and creation of Sarah Coleman and her team’s mural entitled “Drop by Drop, a River is Formed.” Culled from over five months of footage documenting the work of renovating the theater, and designing and painting the mural, the film captures the spirit of this community that Kit and I now call home. https://nevadatheatre.com/gallery/