Film Categories: Nature

  • PANDALAND: Making IT Count

    “PANDALAND: Making IT Count” is about how children become engaged and learn to grapple with big social issues. The filmmaker accomplishes this by encouraging playful exploration in a multi-media installation of 70+ toy pandas she created in her neighbourhood. The vibe of the film is lighthearted and optimistic. As the children initiate an election on behalf of the pandas, their experience embodies community building, demonstrates acts of civic engagement and conveys the important message that, by working together, even young children can effect change. The film is a life-affirming tribute to kids’ compassion and the birth of their activism! This…

  • Light and Land

    Lingering somewhere between fantasy and realism, this futuristic documentary underscores atmospheric phenomenon within mysterious environmental incongruence.

  • Camera Trap

    CAMERA TRAP is a comparative installation using moving images a hundred years apart. The first half of the work looks at Muybridge as both animal and landscape photographer, compared with the second half which works with current animal camera/video traps from the rainforests of Sabah (Malaysian Borneo). A visual and aural comparison of domesticated versus wild animals. Staged shooting versus remote capture. Caged sounds from the zoo versus field recordings from the rainforests. How does the way we use camera equipment on documenting animals then and now, tell us about what we are looking for through the lens? In collaboration…

  • Sand In Her Shoes

    A fantastical, lyrical exploration of a woman’s healing journey created through evocative visual images and sound incorporating elements of ritual and dream. Filmed in the Chihuahua Desert of New Mexico and in a constructed room with trees growing out from the walls. The details of texture, light and colour in the treatment of physical space and the creation of environments become metaphorical expressions of emotion.

  • Matin Dans Une Foret de Pins (Morning in the Pine Forest)

    The lives of six young people unfold in a journey through different worlds revealed and interwoven, where the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream cease to exist. The volatile and seductive landscape of urban and rural Latvia was treated as a rich context for the complex relationships one has with the world – inviting the viewer to come upon the questions that bind us in our common need to understand our humanness. This film is based on the lives of HELENA, EVA, JANKA, GUNTIS, ANNA and GALC.

  • Glide

    * official selection Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn 2024 * official selection Athens Animfest – 3rd Prize Experimental Competition * official selection Les Sommets du cinema d’animation, Montreal * official selection The West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film FestivaL A meditation on the radically different means of creation available to us, Jason Zumpano’s latest short “Glide” is an invitation to the mythopoetic and the various materials, from the painterly to the digital, that bring it into existence. Against Matisse-like colour palettes and impressionistic-resolutions, the central figure of “Glide” is a woman floating on a lantern-helmed rowboat. We float through various angles and…

  • ARK

    Ark describes a time when we had a front row seat where it seemed that we could see everything yet it felt as if we were seeing nothing at all. Over the years I’ve found fewer and fewer animals when I go out into nature to look at this or to film that. In the last year I haven’t found any wild animals and I’ve rarely heard any birds. So where have all the other animals gone? What has happened to them and what is going to happen to us? The human niche or ecological polis of human society has…

  • Radius

    From my perspective any place can be seen as sacred. I believe you can become so familiar with a place that you can feel the sacred in every aspect of its land, air and water. The more familiar I become with a place the more I tend to fall in love with it and in turn many of its truths are revealed. On March 31, 2022 my life partner Cheryl passed away in hospice. In April I decided to make a pilgrimage to places near our house where we enjoyed taking walks after moving to the village in October of…

  • Freya

    Tethering falconry and motherhood, Freya weaves together themes of death and magic, where seasons re-arrange, just as myth and memory are re-cast through a childhood spell.

  • River

    A hand-processed black and white study of the Ottawa River in winter. Commissioned by the Lightproof Film Collective with sound design by Eric Walker.