Film Categories: environment

  • Water Fields

    Water Fields is a rhythmic audiovisual composition, taking place in California’s dry landscape.

  • Tracks I-III

    Inspired by phantom rides—films from the late 19th century shot from the front of moving trains—“Tracks I-III” follows old and new technological traces that have shaped movement and representation. Historical landscapes once captured along railway lines are now reimagined through a carefully fragmented scenery, where motion splits, diverges, and advances in all possible directions. Truttmann’s playful exploration of spatial and temporal dislocations is grounded in a specific location and its history: a section of the “Ischlerbahn,” one of Austria’s first major long-distance rail lines, which was closed in 1957 despite strong protests from all segments of the population. Originally a…

  • back home

    back home follows filmmaker, Nisha Platzer’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, twenty years after he took his own life. As she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teen, a complex portrait emerges. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on Super8 and 16mm film, and lyrical images hand-processed with plants, seaweed, soil and ashes, ‘back home’ floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, grief and loss: illuminating the transformative power of healing in community.

  • Passengers

    In 2024 I decided to visit some places I had been to before, places near where I am in the present and places I’ve never been to in the past. As I travelled from here to there, filming this and that I was reminded once again that nothing stands still and nothing stays the same. One of the things that I always wondered about was the intention of the occupied places I would see and what determined the way in which they were expressed. Sometimes it seemed clear while at other times it didn’t appear clear at all. I was…

  • La noirceur souterraine des racines

    Shot in Quebec (Canada), La noirceur souterraine des racines (The subterranean blackness of roots) is a 16 mm film triptych which uses several processes specific to analog cinema (hand processing, optical printing, photochemical alteration). The film seeks to show the sensory experience of the invisible life of stones, plants, and the nature that surrounds us.

  • Tarpaulins

    The point of departure for “Tarpaulins” was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit…

  • Pirate Bay

    “Pirate Bay” is a musical film portrait of a beach-based fishing fleet in Hastings, in south-east England. A stroll on a stormy late winter’s day leads us along the dormant boats lying on the beach at low tide. Through the rhythmic montage and a jazz composition with its fragmented tones, the tourist seaside town becomes an abandoned battlefield studded by plundered ships, recalling constant quarrels on and about the sea. A sparse dystopia by Lisa Truttmann, with music by Guido Spannocchi on alto sax, featuring Gina Schwarz on double bass.

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • Messengers

    A poetic exploration of three subterranean telescopes in remote regions of Canada, Japan, and Antarctica that reveal a new way of perceiving the universe from within. Underground, we are dreaming into the earth.

  • Memory Rituals [Part Two]: Memory of Trees

    The second in an ongoing, annual series. Thinking about remembering, about forgetting, and about the memory of trees.