"We are proud to be able to count Elektrizitätswerke Schönau (EWS) among our family of sponsors," says executive director of the International Uranium Film Festival, Márcia Gomes de Oliveira. "We hope that this will encourage other clean energy or socially and ecologically responsible companies and people world-wide to follow Elektrizitätswerke Schönau and support our globally important film festival as well." The next International Uranium Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro will take place from May 17th to 31st and in Berlin from October 7th to 12th, 2025. Further festivals are planned in USA - Hollywood, Window Rock, Washington DC, Hawai, Texas - and in Italy. 

 

Since 2011, the International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) has been showing films from all over the world about the risks and consequences of nuclear weapons, nuclear power and the entire nuclear fuel chain from uranium mining to nuclear waste, from Hiroshima to Fukushima. "The Uranium Film Festival is unique because it tries to make the complex subject of nuclear power and its risks accessible to everyone," says Jörg Sommer, Chairman of the German Environmental Foundation. 

 

 

After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the “energy rebels” of Schönau, Germany, launched a grassroots revolution in the Black Forest to take control of their community’s power. Their creation, EWS, not only triggered the country’s transition to renewable energy but also demonstrated the need for grassroots democratic control of energy production.  EWS, which stands for Elektrizitätswerke Schönau (Power Company Schönau), is a one-of-a-kind, many-sided cooperative, collectively owned and guided by 6,500 members, that not only dis- tributes and produces green energy but also pushes technical and market innovations. It functions as a multiplier for like-minded, noncorporate clean-energy projects.