The Word for World is Forest
Saturday 5th October
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
16:00 - 17:15 | 65min plus Q&A
International short films
In a world shaped by wildfires and heatwaves, what might plants have to say about sound and vision, language and wordlessness? How can our flora friends offer up rhizomatic selves, decentralized intelligences, and alternative ways of looking? Lichen development, onion science fiction, and lessons on gender from the Ginkgo tree converge in this programme which explores our communion with the botanical world.
Films by:
Janelle VanderKelen | Xin Shen | Philip Hoffman | Takahiro Suzuki | Tessa Garland | Hogan Seidel & Gabby Follett | Josh Weissbach
A valley without trees
Janelle VanderKelen | 6min
In "A Valley Without Trees," the lowly onion that burrows into the soil and spends most of its life underground is cast as an interpreter or potential sensory prosthetic that offers a different way of understanding (and perhaps communicating with) the land, planet, and cosmos in which it grows.
bearing fruit of fondness, Grounds
of Coherence #2
Xin Shen | 6min
Filmed in Northern Isle of Skye, bearing fruit of fondness is a 16mm black and white film hand processed with a type of invasive cotoneaster that is native to Eastern Asia, and was brought to the UK in the 19th century as an ornamental plant. Working with elemental kinship, the process guides a capacity to relate to pain while grounded in the understanding of interdependence, where concept of belonging erodes through patterns of mother-child relationships that extend to nation and citizen, land and dweller. The film features a single-take vocal performance of the script in Chinese by Shen Xin, interspersed with breath and stillness against the Southwest storms heard from their home.
Language Unknown
Janelle VanderKelen | 6min
This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelium, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.
Deep 1
Philip Hoffman | 15min
Filmed from 2020 - 2022, processed and decayed with hyacinth & lichen extract, the film is built on a sustainable practice: images and the imaging making process evolve out of "a complex material engagement with an eco-system that draws out the expressive possibilities of living things beyond conventional forms of representation". Kim Knowles on Hoffman's practice - Excerpt from "Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices" -Chapter 17, "From Film Labs to Film Farm"
kaze no e (or why the wind whispers
among the leaves)
Takahiro Suzuki | 7min
Four young researchers in Big Sky Country begin to wonder about the vastness of the world and greater cosmos. If non-human presences were capable of harboring intelligence and communicating, what information could they pass along? Using the trees and wind as messengers, the researchers record and decipher writings and recordings from the trees and wind, relating them back to the land and universe, before finding ways to embody them through sound and movement as a form of empathy and communion with a greater intelligence.
Drift
Tessa Garland | 7min
Shot on Super 8, the film captures a walk around a precarious, low-lying sandbank island, where fleeting observations come into focus only to vanish again. Rotations and cycles ebb and flow through manmade wind vanes assembled from foraged sea drift, while sea-worn objects hint at deeper meanings beneath the surface. Prehistoric-looking cacti punctuate the island, contributing to its strange, otherworldly atmosphere.
Objectionable Fruit
Hogan Seidel, Gabby Follett | 15min
Objectionable Fruit is an experimental documentary examining the Ginkgo tree—a living fossil celebrated for its resilience and unique capacity to change sexes, defying human-imposed binaries. Using the Ginkgo as a metaphor for fluidity and endurance, the film weaves together themes of gender identity, ecological interconnectedness, and the nuanced complexities of trans existence.
Summer School
Josh Weissbach | 3min
Along the banks of the salaca river in rural latvia, a haven emerges where analog film wizards and aspiring apprentices unite. at this pop-up school, the art of filmmaking intertwines with botany, folklore, and magic, weaving a tapestry of creativity and tradition.
