Ventana Wilderness Alliance brings us the Wild & Scenic Film Festival.

The Wild & Scenic Film Festival – like Sundance in Park City; United Nations Association in the South Bay; Reel Work in Santa Cruz; Banff in Alberta, Canada; and Ambulante in Mexico City – is a big film festival that unfolds in one venue and launches smaller versions of itself out to other cities.

And, like the other film festivals, Wild & Scenic comes to Monterey County annually. This Saturday will be its fourth year, brought to Monterey’s Golden State Theatre by the Ventana Wilderness Alliance.

The South Yuba River Citizen’s League puts on the big Wild & Scenic in Nevada City every January. VWA Executive Director Mike Splain and VWA Youth in Wilderness Program Manager Bryce Winter traveled there to meet filmmakers and select this year’s films.

Take the majesty of the outdoors, the compact technology of digital cameras, and the intrepidness of nature-lovers, and you’ve got the makings of a breathtaking collection of films. This one carries bigger messages than travelogues to admire or celluloid vistas to gaze at. Across three hours, interspersed with time for mixing and mingling, VWA has lined up 13 films that skew differently, more positively, from previous iterations, Splain explains:

“In years past, some attendees lamented that some of the films were disheartening and that the emphasis was too much on Earth’s environmental challenges. So this year we made a concerted effort to emphasize conservation solutions, rather than problems.”

Animated short A Line in the Sand employs the words of Edward Abbey, essayist of ecology treatises and author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. One provocative passage, illustrated with the conviction and style of propaganda posters, reads: “At some point we must draw a line… and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations – thus far and no further.”

And in a shift to a softer focus, the organizers avoid environmental warning fatigue and negative saturation by panning across Earth’s beauty.

The World Beyond the World is a thing of beautiful moving photographs, a meditation on trekking into the wild, a calm but insistent piece about the grand and tiny miracles of Nature. The narration comes from Robert Marshall’s 1929 publication Alaska Wilderness: Exploring the Brooks Range; the images hail from 2013’s Expedition Arguk across 300 miles of the Alaskan Arctic.

Splain draws lines that connect the films to the geography and issues that they (and we) can relate to via VWA’s purview over the Santa Lucia Mountains and Big Sur – parallels that blockbuster movie Everest, which opened widely last weekend, shares primarily in theme only.

“Much like the Everest region, Big Sur and the Ventana Wilderness have a few areas that are literally being ‘loved to death’ by abundant and often careless visitors,” Splain says. “One place in particular, the Pine Ridge Trail between Big Sur Station and Sykes Camp (near Sykes Hot Springs) is severely impacted with thousands of visitors every year and little to no Forest Service funding.”

The U.S. Forest Service produced a short film that’s in the fest about the damage illegal marijuana grows inflict on public lands, and how volunteers are working to remedy it.

The 12-minute Brilliant Darkness: Hotaru in the Night is about the diminishment of complete natural darkness to artificial light, and its effects on fireflies in Japan and the U.S. It looks like a marvel of quiet offering respite from more rambunctious and whimsical films like Teton Hooping Contingency, about some folks in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who hula-hoop atop mountains.

Drawn is a 42-minute number that closes the festival. It’s about an illustrator who merges drawings and GoPro-like footage to document his mountain-climbing, remote village-visiting, camaraderie-building world quest for… himself. Or his place on Earth. Or his departed friend’s memory. You get the idea.

“Films featured at Wild &Scenic give people a sense of place,” the festival’s tour manager and former Big Sur resident Jenna Brager says in a statement. “In our busy lives, it’s easy to get disconnected from our role in the global ecosystem.”

In addition to the films, there will be real-world presences to remind you.

The festival is visited by filmmakers, including Sinuhe Xavier, director, photographer and creative director for Overland Journal. He’ll talk about his film The Story of Place and about Utah’s Greater Canyonlands ecosystem.

Paola Fiorelle Berthoin, who rallied for restoration of the Carmel River and saw and documented the beginning of its fruition in the destruction of the Carmel River dam, will be there.

So will Tom Killion (moonlighting as a featured artist at the Robinson Jeffers Fall Festival this weekend), to sign copies of his new book of coastal woodcut art paired with poems by luminaires, California’s Wild Edge.

The festival is emceed by Marina’s exuberant Green Party mayor and professional botanist, Bruce Delgado.

Once viewers leave the theater, they may not look outside the same way.

WILD & SCENIC FILM FESTIVAL 6pm doors, 7-10pm films, Saturday at Golden State Theatre, 417 Alvarado St., Monterey. $20/advance; $25/door. 423-3191, www.VentanaWild.org