Root

Screening Room VII

After Eclipse, we search for seeds of change: ideas and actions that may (or may not) lead us toward Return. Root is our most diverse Screening Room, gathering films of rebirth, alternative approaches and tentative repair: from the speculative techno-fixes of Mammoth to the intimate new beginnings of Edén. We open with Sean Fisher’s Give Me a Garden of Weeds, a hopeful short that searches for resilient life in liminal spaces and asks what new ecologies we might cultivate.

Give me a Garden of Weeds
Sean Allen Fisher

“Exploring the interstitial gardens springing forth in the forgotten places. A celebration of all things inelegant, tough, and unwanted. Pretty is fine, but when is the last time you saw a gardenia burrow through concrete?”

Edén
Juan López López

“Can a man or woman leave their mother’s womb for a second time?” Edén opens with this blunt question and unfolds as a dark, sensory parable of rebirth. Two characters, trapped in shadow, grope through a world where the digital and the natural fold into one another; perception is tested, speech is curtailed, and touch and sound become the means of navigation. The film treats light and silence as forces of renewal – an auditory and visual quest in which “existing is more important than living,” and where the desire to embrace a future that breaks with the past propels the action toward a tentative emergence.

Read as a work of restoration, Edén is at once intimate and collective: a call to “leave behind what no longer serves and to embrace a future full of possibilities,” asking audiences to consider personal and social transformation as twin tasks. The film functions as a quiet epiphany, less a tidy solution than a provocation to start again, to remake the conditions of life where light, silence and renewed relation to the natural world guide a fragile new beginning.

Binz Brush Blink
Erin Woodbrey

“My grandmother used to give me butterfly kisses, and I remember them tenderly. They were quiet, grounding, and fleeting. I thought of that care when I was leaving Zürich a while back. I had been in the city to meet with dendrochronologists studying specimens from a 13,000-year-old pine forest. I climbed over a fence behind a complex of buildings, and in the wetland tucked between parking lots, offices, and apartments, I found one of the remaining stumps still in situ.”

Dear One
Nora Jane Long

Dear One is a poetic documentary unfolding in the form of a typed love letter written line by line in tandem with plants, animals and terrain. The piece invites viewers into an open-ended meditation on intimacy, exploitation and return. Through its rhythmic structure and meditative pacing, Dear One asks viewers to slow down, listen closely, and consider what it means to return to a relationship somehow marked by loss, neglect or disconnection.

Hope Springs Eternal
Heather Bird Harris, Monica Ordóñez & Bryan Tarnowski

Hope Springs Eternal models the mindset we need as we move through the climate crisis; documenting a creative act of environmental resistance and community care in New Orleans. In April 2024, a group of artists, dancers, musicians and supporters gathered to support the work of RISE St. James, a grassroots environmental justice organisation fighting to protect St. James Parish from petrochemical expansion.

During a live performance, participants created a large-scale painting using ink made from local oak trees and paint made with soil gathered from a contested plot of land at the heart of Louisiana’s struggle between life and industry. The site, Buena Vista Plantation, is believed to be the burial ground of more than 158 enslaved and formerly enslaved people and is also the proposed location for a Formosa Plastics facility. Even before expansion, Formosa emits over 800 tons of toxic chemicals each year into the surrounding community, part of the region now known as “Cancer Alley.”

Hope Springs Eternal honours the ongoing fight to protect ancestral land and amplifies the intergenerational struggle for environmental justice in Louisiana. The event and film served as a fundraiser to materially support RISE St. James’ legal battle against Formosa, while also sustaining community resistance through an expression of grief and hope – made by community, for community, in defence of land and life.

Some Things we Tended
Mars Saude

Some Things we Tended explores the future of food production in a changing climate through 16mm documentation of two sites in mid Wales: an automated research greenhouse and a small-scale organic market garden. These settings lead to a miniature excursion into a speculative future rooted in Welsh soil.

Mammoth
Adam Sébire

Mammoth superimposes two climate engineering (geoengineering) projects that are currently funded and underway, each courting the notion of Return. One is Pleistocene Park and Colossal Inc.’s proposal to genetically engineer woolly mammoths back from extinction, reintroducing them to the melting Arctic tundra to “re-wild” it as before Homo sapiens arrived. This dramatic intervention in nature, its proponents hope, would lock thawing methane deposits back into the permafrost, averting a disastrous climate tipping point.

The other is a Climeworks’ carbon dioxide removal plant under construction in Iceland, capable of direct air capture of 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually, a prototype for a project that the company has codenamed “Mammoth.”

These two mammoth-scale geoengineering endeavours are set in counterpoint. The film unfolds through documentary footage of the carbon capture machines rising in Iceland, while a voiceover – delivered from some imagined future vantage point by an AI – recounts a speculative history of the de-extinction project, ending with humanity’s downfall from the methane emissions of the very mammoths designed to save us.

The work carries a wry, almost comedic tone, probing the hubris behind such techno-fixes. While not dismissing the science, Mammoth makes its satire plain: in seeking ever-grander solutions to the climate crisis, we risk compounding its dangers while enabling polluters to continue business as usual, offsetting their way out of urgent emissions reductions.

Operation Habbakuk
Colin Lyons

Following Mammoth, Operation Habbakuk continues the discourse on techno-fixes, this time as an invitation to imagine. The film revisits a peculiar episode of WWII military history – the proposal to build an unsinkable aircraft carrier from pykrete, a mixture of ice and sawdust. From this curious point of departure, Colin Lyons connects to more recent geoengineering ideas aimed at preserving polar ice, exposing both the absurdity and allure of such schemes.

The work is not a prescription but a provocation. To face the climate crisis, we must innovate and think beyond the obvious, yet also ask whether technological fixes can truly deliver the futures they promise. Lyons’s tongue-in-cheek approach balances satire with urgency, reminding us that creative speculation – even when improbable – can spark vital debate about which radical solutions merit exploration, and how they must remain accountable to ecosystems and communities alike.

Chronos, Time of Sand
Nicole Dextras

Described as a sort film “set in a dystopian drought where desert plants enable one man to survive,” Chronos closes Root as a practical fable of small-scale resilience. Nicole Dextras follows a lone tinkerer who survives through low-tech ingenuity: a dew-catching tower, plant-based textiles and edible drought species. The director explains the project “aspires to combat climate anxiety by depicting the skills and DIY technologies that are available today.” The film offers quiet, learnable practices – rooted responses that model how communities might adapt and endure.