It’s a Jungle Out There : Movies: The viability of Montana’s Wildlife Film Festival has been threatened by a host of environmental imitators.

MISSOULA, Mont. —  In an annual ritual nearly as welcome as the spring thaw, hundreds of Montana residents trickled down from the hills last week to join filmmakers from around the country at the 14th annual International Wildlife Film Festival.

“People just bust their butts to get here” said festival founder Charles Jonkel, a wildlife biologist renowned for his work with grizzly, black and polar bears. “They know they’re going to see a show that never happens anywhere else on Earth.”

For the first time this year, Jonkel’s enthusiasm for the weeklong wildlife extravaganza was tempered with anxiety. His homespun celebration, attended annually by 5,000 guests and 60 to 100 filmmakers, has become so popular that a host of imitators has cropped up, threatening the viability of this low-budget Missoula event.

Jonkel, 60, who launched the festival in 1977 with the goal of improving the scientific accuracy of wildlife films. Only one other such festival existed in the world at the time--the Bath Wildlife Filmmakers Symposium in Britain.

Now, however, there are several new wildlife and environmental film festivals in Europe, and at least three competing festivals have debuted in this country. The International Environmental Film Festival convened in Boulder, Colo., last month. The Aveda U.S. Environmental Film Festival will be held in Santa Monica April 25-28. And the Jackson Hole (Wyo.) Wildlife Film Festival is scheduled for Sept. 18-22.

So crowded is the field these days that rival festival directors seem to have the attitude “Heal the planet and kill the competition,” said Deborah Caulfield, executive director of the Boulder festival.

Added CarolAnne Dolan, who came to Missoula to acquire films for National Geographic Explorer, “I really don’t see how all the festivals can survive. I don’t think there’s enough product.”

Missoula has the advantage of its popularity among outdoor types, surrounded as it is by mountain ranges that are home to wolves, grizzly bear, elk and eagles. But the humble college town can’t compete with the “amusement park atmosphere” of Jackson Hole or Boulder, said Peter Steinhart, a judge at the Missoula Festival and a contributing editor to Audubon magazine.

Neither can Jonkel compete with the Hollywood-style budgets of upstart festivals. The Missoula event is supported by local donations, entry and admission fees, and the sale of festival T-shirts, mugs and novelty items like a plaster cast grizzly tracks ($15).

Both the Jackson Hole and the Boulder festivals, on the other hand, are sponsored by National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, among others. Turner Broadcasting was the name sponsor for the Boulder festival. The budget for the Jackson Hole festival is $400,000; Jonkel’s festival cost $50,000 this year.

Jonkel says he refuses to solicit funds from sponsors such as National Geographic who enter films in the festival. It’s a matter of ethics, he says; the financial backing might influence the judging process.

This may seem a recklessly uncompromising stance for a man faced with formidable competition. But ethics, in fact, is what Charles Jonkel--as well as his festival--is about.

Jonkel conceived of the film festival in the early 1970s because he was disgruntled with the quality of wildlife films then appearing on television and at the movies. The public, he said, tends to get their information about wildlife from Disney and other entertainment films--films that are often inaccurate. For example, he said the film “The Bear” shows an orphan cub adopted by a large male grizzly. Such an adoption would not happen in the wild, Jonkel says, but when audiences view such a scene they register the behavior as biological fact.

Such misinformation not only makes the work of wildlife biologists more difficult, Jonkel said, but “In the end it (the inaccuracy) ends up hurting the animals.”

Jonkel’s festival is intended to encourage responsible filmmaking by rewarding technically accurate films. The 106 films submitted for judging this year included everything from student films and public service announcements to full-length documentaries. Wildlife agencies, such as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, traditionally enter films, as does the BBC Natural History Unit and PBS’ “Nature” series.

There is, as yet, no category for feature films. Jonkel said he would like to influence standards for the use of wildlife in Hollywood films, but he has little hope of doing so from Missoula.

“(Hollywood producers) don’t give a damn what we say,” he said.

A panel of judges selected each year includes two wildlife biologists, two filmmakers and two humanists--writers, scholars or artists. The judging categories are free form, often evolving as the judges discuss the films submitted. For example, this year’s festival favorite, “Here Be Dragons,” (a look at crocodiles and wildebeests in Africa produced by Alan Root) won an award for “Outstanding Presentation of Ecological Interrelationships.”

Other quirky award categories were for “Promoting Awareness of a Little-Known Eco System” (a film about life under the ice) and “Promoting Wildlife Appreciation Among Culturally Diverse Children” (“Spirit of the Eagles”).

Jonkel and other festival workers have drawn up an exacting code of ethics for wildlife filmmakers, assuring accurate portrayal of wildlife behavior. The guidelines are in part an attempt to bring professional standards to an occupation that only recently has made any claims to professional status, said Jonkel.

Ten years ago, predictions were that wildlife filmmaking was moribund, victim of the American public’s low tolerance for science, he said. But the recent interest in the environment has revived the industry so there are now plentiful outlets for natural history films, mostly on public television and cable.

But, Jonkel said, “It’s still damn tough to be a wildlife filmmaker in this country.”

Sympathetic to the hardships of the profession, Jonkel particularly supports struggling student and novice filmmakers, such as Carrie House, an American Indian filmmaker from New Mexico and one of this year’s award-winners. House said she uses “pawnshop” cameras, and works summers as a firefighter to support her filmmaking career.

House and other filmmakers gathered in Missoula said they would attend the Jackson Hole festival this year in hopes the location would attract influential people in the film industry. Despite their devotion to Jonkel, many said they could not afford to miss a festival that might yield helpful contacts.

Jonkel may be the lone bear biologist in a crowd of filmmakers. He may not have the money, location or big-time contacts some of the other festivals promise.

But he has Montana, where even the loggers and plumbers will travel 100 miles to watch wolves and bears on the screen. That eases Jonkel’s fears somewhat.

“If we have to, we can keep this sucker going just with the people in Western Montana,” Jonkel said.