Film Categories: Ecology

  • Fire & Water

    For many years I lived near the village of Volcano, Hawai’i in a native Ohia rainforest. My house was about ten kilometers from the entrance to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park so I would go there whenever I could. Here was a place that displayed the essential forces of earth, air, fire and water, the very elements that form our existence. This had quite a profound impact on me, especially when new land suddenly appeared when only moments before it did not exist. Once the new land was established, birds, insects and seeds would establish themselves beginning with Hapuu ferns (a…

  • Air & Earth

    There are certain places that sustain me. Places where the elements of nature are so evocatively displayed, that my desire to return and experience them again never loses its hold. The Big Island of Hawaii is 20 degrees latitude north of the equator giving it a climate with a narrow range of temperatures along with continuous prevailing winds. Above 30 degrees latitude north and 30 degrees latitude south of the equator cold air from the Arctic and cold air from Antarctica mingles vigorously with hot air from the tropics. It is largely this interaction of cold air from the poles…

  • Burning Farm House

    While driving down Highway 13 in Saskatchewan, Canada I noticed some unusual black smoke on the horizon which turned out to be an early 20th Century farmhouse. I quickly found an empty field nearby and positioned my camera for about an hour until the farmhouse merged into the prairie landscape.

  • Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf

    Forty years ago Austrians voted against opening a nuclear power plant that had already been built. Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf is a monument to the power of public protest and the potential of a democratic vote. After catastrophic flooding across Europe, Hope Tucker visited the nuclear power plant outside of Vienna that would have been powered by the same model reactor as Fukushima. Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf has an edit structure based on the chain of action in a boiling water reactor power plant and the path of protest that kept this plant from opening. Sound design incorporates a recording of the Tohoku earthquake.

  • Folds of Stone

    Rock is subject to constant change. Natural forces, geodynamics, and anthropogenic interventions shape the supposedly rigid matter as an extended organism, which can only be perceived in geological thinking of time. In their short film “Folds of Stone” Nicole Krenn and Lisa Truttmann continue these thoughts: We see breathing stones, pulsating furrows, trembling rocks, material that vibrates. Microscopic landscapes dissolve in the image. Surface, materiality and structure oscillate between jagged rock edges and soft, silky fabric folds. The two artists translate a multimedia installation from an old sawmill at national park Gesäuse into the cinema space, showing the process of…

  • kauaʻi ʻōʻō

    Hawaii 1987, the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō sings its final serenade.

  • How amazingly unlikely is your birth

    What could a cosmology of one person’s life look like? A daughter examines the life and premature death of her father, who had a troubled relationship with the psychiatric medical establishment and was passionate about ecology, politics and space travel.

  • 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.