Return

Screening Room VIII

“In terms of investments,” Galician farmer Jaime Otero tells us in Sintrópica, “life is the best one.” Return gathers films that look to an optimistic, sustainable future by listening to each other and the world around us, tending the ecosystems that can sustain us, and boldly rebuilding lost connections. From ocean and coastline to marsh and forest floor; from independent, community-led energy projects to communities reliant on the seasonal stability of ice, these works offer paths toward repair.

OCEANUS | Conversation with our Ocean
Elizabeth Ogilvie & Robert Page

Oceanus presents the ocean as an active partner in tackling the climate emergency. The film surveys underwater, coastal and near-shore habitats as vital, living infrastructure – riverbanks, beaches, salt-marshes, kelp and seagrass beds – and is part of the artists’ Into the Oceanic project, an immersive art-science enquiry developed with ocean scientists and shown at events including COP26 (with collaborators such as Professor Bill Austin of Blue Carbon Scotland).

The artists describe a slow, sensory approach: “Prior to filming we spend time simply observing, absorbing through our senses. Only when we are ready do we start focusing our conversation through the camera lens. This intimate conversation with our ocean is unhurried, resulting in almost abstract, dream-like footage.”

At the core of Ogilvie & Page’s work is the knowledge that coastal and marine systems hold practical solutions; they are points of return. Marine photosynthesizers produce roughly half the oxygen on Earth, and coastal “blue carbon” habitats sequester large amounts of carbon per hectare, often far outpacing terrestrial forests. Protecting and restoring these habitats also delivers co-benefits – shoreline protection and biodiversity gains – which makes them important, practical tools in climate mitigation and adaptation.

This science has the potential for huge positive change in our world, but without the public having knowledge of its capacity there is little motivation to act. Art by its very nature can encourage this agency and inclusion and is invaluable at communicating often complex cultural and philosophical concepts.

Messages from the Marsh
Amy Kaczur

Following Oceanus, Messages from the Marsh draws us closer to shore, into the tidal wetlands that quietly defend our coasts. These marshes (filmed along the U.S. East Coast), projected to be underwater by 2050, are celebrated here for both their fragile beauty and their extraordinary power: filtering water, storing carbon, and buffering storms.

30 Fragments
Tim Laing, Alastair & Fleur Mackie

Our focus stays by the water’s edge, this time with the making of a physical artwork by Alastair and Fleur Mackie, sensitively filmed by Tim Laing. 30 Fragments follows the artists as they collect broken plastic fishing floats from a stretch of Atlantic coastline. Caught in the boulder section of a beach near their home in Cornwall, these fragments have been driven into the rock matrix, where they continue their slow absorption into the wider coastal system. Using rudimentary hand tools, the artists recover the plastic on spring low tides, working methodically to clear the site. The film captures this process as they move through the natural landscape – uncovering the quiet collision between the synthetic and the organic, and reflecting the deeper contradictions in how we perceive, value, and inhabit such spaces today.

These fragments are assembled into a mobile sculpture that moves gently in response to air currents. The piece references the kinetic art movement, while remaining rooted in an act of environmental stewardship. The artists will continue making these works until the beach is free of debris.

Originally created for Blue: Art for the Oceans – a charity auction supporting Blue Marine Foundation – 30 Fragments quietly reflects on the long-term impact of marine plastic, not through data or polemic, but through gentle care and attention. Repair does not have to begin with grand gestures, but can start with small acts of conscience.

Dear Phonocene
Mélia Roger

Part performance film, part sonic experiment, Dear Phonocene offers a way to care for the living through sound. Set within the monoculture Douglas pine plantations near the director’s home in the Rhône, France, Roger began making field recordings a decade ago – and soon noticed an unsettling phenomenon.

“It’s strange – I’m in a forest, but it doesn’t sound like one. This contrast between the vast hectares of Douglas fir plantations and the poverty of the soundscape was the starting point. I wanted to listen to these places and understand how their acoustic ecology works. Over the years, I built a large archive of recordings from these areas, spending time contemplating and listening deeply. I discovered unexpected species appearing after clear cuts, or living in more mixed zones. But with time, many of the places where I had recorded were cut down. These clear cuts completely transformed the landscape, creating a sensation of solastalgia – when you feel you’ve lost your home even though you haven’t moved. The project began from that feeling.

Field recording is often associated with men travelling far away to capture pristine soundscapes in remote areas. I wanted to ground my practice in this post-natural landscape, and invited other women field recordists to experiment with me. Together, we performed sonic actions, imagining a sound fiction where we could reactivate the past soundscapes of this place. Inspired by recent scientific studies on acoustic enrichment showing that sound diffusion in damaged environments can help their restoration, I wanted to explore the speculative gesture. The sounds we are playing were recorded on site over several years, collected in bits of forest that have since been cut down or in unlogged areas. Here, without scientific pretension but as a poetic fiction of acoustic care, our sounds represent a certain reactivation of a past soundscape. Like a distant memory of extinct species, could these sounds perhaps have a positive impact on these places?

How to listen to this post-natural landscape? What do we take in when we take in sound? The term phonocene is directly borrowed from Donna Haraway, and taken up by Vinciane Despret to propose a philosophical concept of an era where the sonic is as important as carbon, where the future of earth depends on its acoustics.”

En cada Hoja del Bosque
(In Every Leaf of the Forest)
Gustavo Valdivia & Iván D’onadío

In Every Leaf of the Forest by Gustavo Valdivia and Iván D’onadío is a touching, immersive documentary shaped by ethnographic research in the Andean forests of Peru and Ecuador. Guided by Constantino Rivas, a farmer and park ranger from the Ampay National Sanctuary in Peru’s Apurimac region – who played a key role in conserving intimpa, an endemic Andean tree species – and by Ángel Paz, a farmer and birdwatcher in Ecuador’s Pichincha region who has developed a technique to attract rare and elusive birds to his farm, the film ventures deep into these forests to reveal how their ecological processes are intricately bound to recent political history. As the journey unfolds, the voices of the protagonists intertwine with the layered soundscape of the forest, exposing the camera’s limits in capturing the full richness of trees, plants, and other life that inhabit these mountainous lands.

The Entangled Forest
Nick Jordan

The Entangled Forest explores the multifaceted interrelationships between trees and fungi within forest ecologies. Featuring the voice of ecologist Suzanne Simard, and her ground-breaking research into tree and fungal communities, the documentary reflects on how the “biological neural network” of forest ecosystems creates a healthy community of co-dependent species. Highlighting cooperation, mutual aid and the redistribution of resources between neighbouring species, the film interweaves Simard’s observations on the wood-wide-web with an atmospheric and textural collaborative soundtrack score, recorded with traditional folk instruments, woodwind and analogue synths. The documentary features a diverse range of tree species and fruiting fungi, growing in ancient forests and urban woodland habitats; filmed from the blazing heat of late summer to the frozen depths of winter.

More than One
Bia Gayotto

From seabed, to shoreline, to marsh, to forest and forest floor: this short experimental film is inspired by a group of women mushroom foragers living on the Sonoma Coast in Northern California, who embody the invisible mycelium network below our feet. Mycelium means “more than one” in New Latin and Greek, and refers to the vegetative part of a fungus, a mass of branching root-like structures. Although invisible, mycelium plays a vital role in decomposing plant material, resisting pathogens, and absorbing water and nutrients. They also help forests absorb carbon pollution, delaying the effects of global warming, and protecting our planet. Therefore, the mycelium network is essential to the well-being of our forests and ecosystems. Similarly, women are the primary caregivers for the well-being our communities, embodying strength, resilience, and connectedness. The work stimulates sensory and contemplative responses, evoking inter-relationships between the women, the mycelium and the forest, micro and macrocosm, real and imaginary.

Iceberg Care
Adam Sébire

A concept that defines this final Screening Room is acts of care. Care and protection of our oceans, our forests, and our ice-covered places. Here, a lone figure tends to four sublime glacial icebergs frozen into sea ice. Known to indigenous Inuit as kassoq these are exquisitely coloured formations of translucent glacier ice, created under enormous pressure at the base of the Greenland ice sheet (Sermersuaq) before being transported by the flow of the Qarajaq glacier. They’re likely to be millennia-old.

“Bergy bits” are repetitively mopped, swept and polished of fallen snow. Their carer’s Sisyphean endeavours are punctuated by moments of connection between him and the ice. (Of course, we can only really know the 10% that floats above water). Ilulissap eqqaa (a Kalaalisut term for the area surrounding an iluliaq or iceberg) is a dangerous place to be since the sea ice here is fragile and the bergs, eroded from below by warm water, can overturn without warning. Belying their monolithic appearance, icebergs are in constant transformation – by wind, current, solar radiation, precipitation, and now, by manmade climate change. Yet, the protagonist’s effort continues.

The artist says he wants to prise open conceptions of our relationship with (and within) nature sufficiently to accommodate more symbiotic and collaborative approaches – such as environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s proposal for a “Symbiocene.”

Above is a single-screen version of what was originally designed as a four-screen installation.

The Darkness: Lessons on Solar Energy, Community, and Power
Nelson Varas Díaz

The Darkness celebrates the bold resilience of the Alto de Cuba community in Puerto Rico. Long left without reliable electricity and abandoned by state infrastructure, they chose not to wait. Together with grassroots organisation Casa Pueblo, they built their own solar future – restoring power, safety, and dignity on their own terms.

What emerges is not only a story of technology but of collective return: neighbours uniting to reclaim autonomy, to resist privatisation, and to show how light – literal and symbolic – can transform fear into possibility. As the director writes: “collective action can ignite hope, power and change in the face of crisis.”

Sintrópica
Miguel García Orive

Sintrópica follows Jaime Otero and his friends on a journey across the Iberian Peninsula, determinedly sharing a regenerative vision of agriculture. Guided by the philosophy of syntropic farming (drawing inspiration from forest ecosystems to produce food while restoring the land) they traverse landscapes from Galicia, to the sea of plastics in Almería, confronting the environmental crises caused by conventional practices.

This alt-road-movie is threaded together by the collection and dispersal of seeds, a tangible act of regeneration that connects them with countless others seeking a new agricultural paradigm. Orive tells us: “Tired of hearing about soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, the deterioration of our diet, and the overexploitation of Earth’s increasingly scarce resources, I decided to take action. In my search for alternative farming models during a trip through Galicia, I met Jaime Otero in the summer of 2022, and with him, syntropic farming. I was immediately fascinated by the radical paradigm shift that this agricultural philosophy puts forward, the powerful way Jaime transmits this vision, and his genuine sensitivity towards the plant world. These ingredients, mixed with an adventure around the Iberian Peninsula, revealed to me a fascinating story to be told that I immediately wanted to be a part of.”