Screening Room V

Flood

In this Screening Room we explore the excesses, both physical and metaphorical, that arise from planetary imbalance. We begin with rising waters and inundation from extreme weather, born of the heating and retreat traced in earlier Rooms. From there, the focus shifts to the over-abundance of waste and pollution saturating our present, before carrying us into the realm of inner overwhelm: the mental floods of anxiety and disorientation that come from living through climate breakdown.

Vanishing Louisiana
Adam Chitayat

Despite global preventative efforts, our climate – and our relationship to it – faces inevitable and unprecedented change within the coming decade. There are communities around the globe that will become unliveable within the lifetimes of their current residents. Envisioned as a series, Vanishing seeks to acknowledge these harsh realities and preserve the stories, ways of life and emotional truths of communities in existential danger.

In the southern parishes of Louisiana, the state has deemed certain populated lands to be already “lost” – leaving residents to the fate of rising seas and rapidly subsiding coasts. No one will be forced to leave, and many will stay until they no longer physically can. The artist asks: “what’s it like to live in a place that cannot be saved?”

Inundation
Tom Hansell

“I live on the north fork of the New River in Creston, North Carolina. We were among the thousands of Appalachian communities flooded by Hurricane Helene on September 27, 2024. This is probably the most personal film I have ever made. Although my family suffered loss from Hurricane Helene, I consider myself lucky. More than 100 residents of western North Carolina people died in the storm and months after the flood, thousands of people are still without permanent homes.

The film references the power of community coming together after the storm. An important, but often overlooked element is the efforts of our region’s artists to help people process our collective experience. The arts are a powerful way for community members to support one another. And I hope that this film is a small contribution to the larger work of healing our region.”

Floods Recede to Luxury
Kathleen Rugh

Ten years after Hurricane Sandy flooded the Dumbo neighbourhood of Brooklyn, new luxury housing is built ever closer to the water’s edge, poised to ignore the risks of future storm surges. Shot on 16mm film with layered exposures created in-camera through multiple exposures, the film examines the neighbourhood in this time of transition and imagines what may still come.

Cutting the Crap
Aletta Harrison

A small group of English cold-water swimmers takes on industry and the government over the misuse of a loophole allowing the flood of raw sewage into coastal waters. “I realised I had an opportunity to tell a story about a natural disaster unfolding almost in my back yard with this film” Harrison tells us.

“I've recently been thinking a lot about the importance of making people feel empowered to do something about the nature and climate crises. While the sewage issue has featured prominently in national news, I felt no one had really pieced together the extraordinary back story of how 11 ‘normal’ individuals launched an extraordinary campaign that is helping to shed light on the scale of sewage pollution.”

Oil Spill
Louis Heilbronn

Louis Heilbronn originally shot this footage in 2021 after an oil spill in Huntington Beach, California. He never fully edited it, and abandoned the project until earlier this year. In reference to the epic westerns that defined the American landscape in Hollywood films, Oil Spill is presented in black and white, and a 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

“I decided to revisit this material as a response to the new U.S. administration’s continuous repeal of our environmental regulations. I wanted to make the film silent as it reflects the country’s current silence and inaction regarding the ongoing climate crisis. The film documents both the oil spill cleanup effort as well as local beach culture. We see people playing volleyball, biking, and carrying surfboards alongside cleanup crews. For me, this juxtaposition speaks to how desensitised we have become to the destruction of our environment.”

A recent New York Times report (28 August 2025) reveals that the United States, wielding its economic might, is pressuring other countries away from their climate pledges and deeper into fossil-fuel dependence. Through trade deals and new alliances with oil producers, the U.S. is pushing nations to buy their oil and gas, blocking global shipping emissions cuts, and opposing restrictions on petroleum-based plastics.

“Through long takes of workers combing the beach for signs of oil, I wanted to stress the meticulous nature of these clean up efforts and the psychical stress it has on the bodies of those who are tasked with executing the work,” Heilbronn adds.

Island Garden
Tessa Garland

Shot on Super 8 film, Tessa Garland’s Island Garden captures an otherworldly landscape – a surreal garden adrift on a sandbank island formed from ocean detritus and sea plastic. The piece realises this Screening Room’s concern with excesses by making plastic and marine waste its focus. Garden assemblages and found structures become “mysterious relics, suspended between past and future,” testifying to the scale of our pollution.

At the same time, Island Garden performs a second, metaphorical flooding. As time “folds, accelerates, and dissolves into its own unravelling entropy,” Garland summons the emotional saturation that accompanies environmental overload. Despite its sensitive production – the artistry of its maker – the film (or, filmed artwork) conveys the weight of plastic pollution, reminding us that this accumulation of debris is not only measurable data but a material fact we now live beside.

This project could be just as easily placed within the festival’s final room, Return, for its championing of art as vital tool in this uneasy ecological moment, using the very stuff of such great concern to raise awareness.

Reverie
Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero

Reverie is a short experimental film exploring the seductive yet destructive presence of plastic in our world. Through the image of a single plastic sheet animated by the wind, the film reflects on plastic’s dual nature: once celebrated for its lightness, beauty, and promise of convenience, it now embodies suffocation, fragility, and ecological harm. The sheet moves fluidly, sometimes resembling something alive, sometimes ghostly or menacing, blurring the line between allure and threat.

The work invites viewers into a contemplative space, questioning how something designed to be so useful and enchanting became a symbol of planetary crisis. By isolating a simple yet universally recognizable object, Reverie amplifies its poetic and unsettling qualities, offering a meditation on desire, illusion, and the environmental consequences of human invention.

MA-QUINA (Quinine Machine)
Sebastian Wiedemann

“Colonial ghosts do not stop h(a)unting and devouring vegetalities” Sebastian Wiedemann writes. Colonial demand for quinine – the alkaloid taken from Cinchona bark – turned a local Indigenous remedy into a global commodity. Europeans raced to harvest bark and plant cinchona at scale, clearing forests and replacing diverse ecosystems with plantations. That extraction reshaped land use, dispossessed communities, and in some places drove trees to the brink of local extinction. What began as knowledge shared between people and place became part of industrial supply chains that were environmentally unstable from the start: monocultures, soil loss, and weakened ecological resilience followed in the wake of profit-driven production.

Using archival images, feverish montage and evocations of Bora and Uitoto conjuring, MA-QUINA traces the plant’s journey from forest to plantation to pharmacy to archive. MA-QUINA confronts another kind of inundation: the social and ecological violence of commodification which results in deforestation, ecological disruption and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge.

The River
Joseph Paul Alvarado

In Joseph Alvarado’s eco-horror The River, flooding becomes less physical and more psychological – carrying us into increasingly surreal terrain. A poisoned waterway, mutant life, and a protagonist whose loss and guilt mirror the planet’s unraveling. Drought gives way to overwhelming rain, and the river that once sustained life becomes toxic. Fish mutate, pollution replaces abundance, and the landscape itself breaks down.

As this intensity builds, protagonist Jack grows increasingly unwell. He loses taste and touch and his shame over his wife’s death deepens. Her spirit appears in a last-ditch attempt to encourage appreciation for what’s at stake – fish, soil, fungi – yet collapse seems inevitable. In its own obscure way, The River acts as both environmental plea and warning.

Where Is Now
Michaela Lind

“Where Is Now is an absurdist meditation on ecological crisis and human connection” Michaela Lind writes. Drawing on the deadpan surrealism of Daniil Kharms and the comedy of Roy Andersson and Jacques Tati, Lind follows a peculiar protagonist, K, as endless rain blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality. The film’s sonic catalyst was Lind’s encounter with whale song – its capacity to open communication in art-therapy sessions became the project’s core question: “what do we lose within ourselves when we silence the whales?”

Where Is Now literally queries the present moment in an era of escalating ecological chaos – what remains of “now” when seas flood, species fall silent and the rhythms that once anchored everyday life dissolve? K frantically struggles to locate some sense of presence amid collapse – “this went into this, that went into that … what’s left?” he asks. Here, the current moment is already displaced by past harm and future uncertainty.

Placed at the close of Flood, the film reframes inundation as an existential condition – a call to listen, to reclaim what we can of the present, and to answer: if not now, when?