Film Categories: Earth

  • Water Break

    Exploring fertility in simbiosis with Mother Earth.

  • Personal Growth

    A short venture into personal growth, the process of surrendering and the ability to release.

  • gestures toward Plant Vision

    A filmic meditation inviting consideration of perception in vegetal beings. Vision is somatic, of the body. In humans, vision is a dominant sense for most people and can feel indistinguishable from the mind when thoughts, judgements, and reactions are unconsciously triggered through visual experiences. Together, vision and mind can block deeper understandings of phenomena and lead to misinformed actions if intentionally looking beyond the illusory surface of things is not pursued. When we consciously imagine how plants might perceive in ways similar to and different than our own, humans extend beyond anthropocentric perception and behaviour to make space for empathetic…

  • Sub Terra

    A routine tree inspection unexpectedly gives way to a journey into the deep. Set in a hidden subterranean world, ‘Sub Terra’ is the haunting mystery of a cryptic, first-person perspective.

  • Green Dream

    In “Green Dream”, Josephine Massarella has infused her vibrant, impressionistic images of nature with the spirit of the goddess Artemis. Evocative and abstract, “Green Dream” relies on a wide range of experimental techniques, including pixilation, optical printing, and manipulated motion to achieve a dreamlike state where the relevance of beauty and the irrelevance of use can be contemplated. Reminiscent of the work of French experimental filmmaker Rose Lawder, “Green Dream” confronts modern overdevelopment with overpowering life forces.

  • seeds are meant to disperse

    seeds are meant to disperse (2015-ongoing) is an ongoing project where I grow, save and share seeds. Seeds take time to grow, to harvest, to prepare, and to share—an act that I see as gift as much as necessity and survival. As such, the seeds are offered as trade or gift, in an attempt to encourage and support alternative systems of exchange. As the seeds are gifted and grown they are meant to help others imagine building a world different from the trajectory it is currently on. As an ongoing and forever growing project, I continue to adapt and rethink…

  • connecting thru grasses

    Looking to prairie grass ecosystems, as well as the technologies that map and reflect the diminishing biome, connecting thru grasses considers how we might both map and define prairie boundaries anew. Considering how satellites passing overhead reflect an image of the earth (and thus of ourselves) back to us, and how these images shape or mis-shape our understanding of the land and our relationship to it, the work looks closer at TERRA, a research satellite that has circled the earth since 1999 constructing images for use in the monitoring of environmental and climate data. http://cbattle.com/connecting-thru-grasses/

  • BAD STARS

    Beginning with the root of the term disaster – from the Greek (dus-) ‘bad’ and (aster), ‘star’ this project considers disaster from an astronomical sense, imagining multiple scales of disaster as causing disruption and temporary disorientation on a planetary scale. Humans have looked to the movement of stars as a way to make sense of the terrestrial for millennia, developing elaborate systems to read celestial bodies as a way to explain and predict events on earth. Studying the stars in order to discover more about the galaxy, astronomy tells us that we are in fact born of the stars, made…

  • the air we breathe

    the air we breathe is an experimental documentary that thinks through the complexities of air pollution by weaving together themes of environmental catastrophe, environmental racism, cultural and political shifts, and conspiracy. Combining research into air pollution along with personal storytelling and speculative imaginings, this project deeply considers the complicated ways in which our air impacts us: from the way that smells travel through it and the memories they evoke; to the physical impacts of pollutants through shared inhalation; to the ways in which the air serves as a metaphor of connection in a cultural sense.

  • Light and Land

    Lingering somewhere between fantasy and realism, this futuristic documentary underscores atmospheric phenomenon within mysterious environmental incongruence.