Shropshire, England and Powys, Wales On the border of England and Wales, two ancient pathways cross. Their stories emerge through poetry and song. In this poetry film, the Kerry Ridgeway takes on the character of a lovelorn maiden. The Offa's Dyke Path is explored as a site of repeated movement of people and livestock over time, carving out ditches, hollows and histories. The film plays upon conventions of hauntology within folk music, poetry and folk horror cinema. "The film set out to explore poetry film as a medium for engaging with place. It considers how taking time to pause in a place can affect our relationship to it, and deepen our sense of connection. I found that taking the time to interact closely with a specific location enabled me to forge deeper connections with that place, and to respond creatively in a way that sought connections between the traces of the past and the detail of the present. I found that following instinct and allowing the process to develop organically resulted in a piece that was led by the place interaction, rather than being dictated by preconceived ideas. And that the process of pulling together the audiovisuals with poetic ideas in the editing suite generated new creative ideas and a lasting connection to the place encountered." This poetry film forms part of a collection entitled 'PAUSE', which examines the ways in which we connect to place, and how taking time to pause can impact on those connections. Created as part of practice-led PhD at Keele University in partnership with Writing West Midlands, with additional supervision from staff at the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. This research is supported by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Tuscon, Arizona, USA It is a surreal scene in the Sonoran Desert: rows and rows of old military aircraft, baking in heat and dust. Welcome to the “Boneyard”, one of the largest collections of old aircraft left over from decades of U.S. airpower and warfare around the world. This large site is located inside the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, an active base on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona (USA), and is where old aircraft go when their time patrolling the skies of the world comes to an end. Over 4,000 aircraft are housed there, making it one of the largest facilities of its kind. The fieldwork film is part of a project that looks at violence of the military meets everyday civilian life directly, making them intriguing laboratories for understanding everyday militarism. It builds on military geographies and borrows Rachel Woodward’s (2005) definition of a “critical military geography… which seeks to understand how life in the civilian sphere is shaped by military structures and imperatives” (as summarised by Bernazzoli and Flint 2009, p. 393). "It may seem a stretch to be suggesting that these military museums cause slow violence, which is typically associated with the real embodied suffering of those impacted by environmental racism and other infrastructural conditions. Because of the specific nature of this military infrastructure, one that straddles military and civilian geographies, given the auto-ethnographic work and observations at large, we are compelled to make a linkage between slow violence and epistemic violence, as the later has been elaborated on in the context of museum politics (Tolia-Kelly 2019)This particular form of epistemic violence resembles slow violence, then, we suggest as real harms are distributed as a result. In an infrastructural scenario like the military museum, we must consider these as gaining force from each other."

Farsi, Kurdish, Arabic dialect On September 16, 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman named Jina (Mahsa) Amini died in Tehran, Iran while in the custody of the so-called morality police. Her death has triggered nation-wide protests. This multi-media creative piece, entitled "Woman, Life, Freedom; The Sounds of A Revolution”, tries to depict the Iranian women’s struggle against the establishment of the Iranian regime since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In so doing, eleven sounds have been extracted from the recordings of the 1979, 2009, 2021 and the 2022 protests, shared on social media from within Iran. The accompanied text situates the sounds within their historic, geographic and political contexts. It is based on data collected from the virtual space. "Through this film, we want to explore the Iranian women’s resistance since 1979. The film is a combination of sounds and texts that show 10 important points in the history of women’s struggle since 1979; starting from International Women’s Day march in 1979 against Khomeini’s mandatory hijab decree, 2009 Green Movement (the killing of Neda Agha Soltan that went viral on social media for the first time), 2021 Protest against water shortage (the beating of a female protester), and the rest are based on the 2022 Jina Mahsa Amini protests (the schoolgirls’ protests, the killing of Nika Shakarami, Tehran Metro protest against systematic patriarchy, the Kurdish lullaby of Shouresh Nikanm’s mother, the Chehelom protests in cemeteries, and the singing of female political prisoners in Evin prison). The sounds are part of a bigger archive, collected from the online released videos posted by Iranian protesters on different social media platforms. Sounds are accompanied by texts which provide the context of each episode, taking the audiences into a sensory experience of a revolution they haven’t been part of. They cannot see, but they can hear and feel the fear, anger, rage, and hope. Our project – a multi-layered, critical study of socio-political movements in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution – is based on exploring the geographies of sound, space, politics and feminism. These are the list of our findings: 1) foregrounding the unheard voices of protesters inside Iran through archive methodologies 2) reflecting on the systematic production of inequality, oppressive urban space, non-citizens, and the discrimination against different ethnic, gender and other marginalised groups by the Iranian regime, and 3) constructing a short exploratory sound film from historic and contemporary witness recordings of protest generated and shared via social media. Making this exploratory, creative sound film is helping audience to imagine the geographies of oppression through sound. The sound technology, coupled with text, added a sensory dimension to the perception of the production of space beyond the visual dimensions. Audiences cannot see but they can read and hear. They read the exact date and location of the happenings and a brief reflection on the context, then they can hear the voices. Through this film, the audience, who is located in different parts of the world, is now familiar with the diverse geographies of protest in Iran. The main challenge we encounter however, was to find the right method for categorising the videoclips. The video clips were added on the social media platforms on an unprecedented speed. To give a context, the Farsi version of Mahsa Amini name for instance, #mahsaamini, twitted more than 274 million times in 24 days after her death. In so doing, we divided the video clips into two main categories of individual struggle of women and collective protests of people, so in this way we could shed light on both the oppression and resistance at the same time."

Portugal Spain Guadiana in Four Movements explores the present and future of the estuary of the transboundary Guadiana River (Iberian Peninsula). Crafted with found footage, images and soundscapes collected during fieldwork in the region, the piece also makes use of data sonification based on current climate models. In an attempt to grasp the overwhelming data-driven climate change scenarios, data sonification provides a more comprehensible experience of the intricate dynamics of this region in their susceptibility, dissimilarity and complexity. The Guadiana estuary presents a revealing case study on the impacts of climate change on fragile biodiversity in the Iberian Peninsula. From the 13th century, the estuary acted as an imaginary borderline between Portugal and Spain. In 1926, upon the Convention of Limits, an agreement on the official border demarcation was eventually reached. The word “limit” referred solely to the legally binding abrupt frontier in the middle of a river between two riparian states. Since then, other sorts of (planetary) limits have also been acknowledged. Despite being highly susceptible to flooding, aridity, water scarcity, drought and salinisation, Guadiana continues to be used for power generation, hyper-intensive agriculture, cattle grazing, and tourism. But how can we address via audio and film present and future scenarios?

Holy Island, England English This short film-poem (55 sec) was made by Ceri Morgan (prose-poet) and Pawas Bisht (documentary film-maker) last summer as part of a project led by Bisht entitled, 'Participatory Storytelling and Arts for Inclusive and Transformative Nature Recovery and People-Nature Connection'. The film-poem was made following a site visit to Holy Island with Natural England, and came out of conversations around artistic/knowledge form(s), audience engagement, tensions between place-making and place-safekeeping, and the impact of climate change, including coastal erosion. In the final line, the sea is poised ready to swallow the island like an oyster/pearl. Field notes were made (written, photographs, moving images) during a site visit that was also a participatory activity, featuring discussions with a community group, artists and colleagues working on sustainability and/or environmental history, and Natural England colleagues. Morgan then wrote a word-based prose-poem based on these notes and discussions, which Bisht combined with film footage he took on the day to make a film-poem. The method aimed to explore and experiment with forms that could be both art and criticism/research within geohumanities and environmental humanities. The film-poem appears to be more effective than either the word-poem or the film on their own. It seems accessible in terms of speaking to a broad audience, and viewers have been very moved by it. Challenges were technical ones - how to write a prose-poem that would include an environmental message without 'telling' (something to avoid in creative writing), and how to make the film fit the text (this required extensive editing).

Australia The methodology is creative practice research to explore how using interview as a method changes the way we film and understand nature. This short film aims to challenge the viewers current relationship to nature. Composer Gail Priest has been exploring how much stretching can the “figure” (of the voice, the field recording, the word even) take before it breaks and becomes abstract filaments. Her work approaches this duality as an exploration of areas of slippage. The sonic results tend towards the hyper-dynamic and super-saturated always attempting to sensorially immerse the listener and heighten awareness of the aural realm. This film combines the two approaches to with the aim to create an audio-visual experience for the audience designed to shift perspectives on nature.

The Lightwell listens to the sounds that intensify inside a building during the first months of COVID-19 pandemic

Khoekhoegowab - English Subtitles Same Different is a rare encounter between the Khoekhoegowab language and a still camera. The poem, written and performed by Namibian artist "Ques", together with the sounds of the bow and the forest, moves along the sun, the wind, and the spirit of the poet herself. Ques keeps us hypnotised with her spoken word while healing the deep-rooted wounds of our colonial past and present. Ques' voice is our ancestors' voice enacting pain and oppression, but also hope and wisdom. A Namibian-Colombian collaboration shot in Germany. Ques' poetry reflects on the deep-rooted wounds of our colonial past, and what is colonialism but the violation of borders? not geopolitical borders, but the borders of the other dignity.

Following the process of how wastewater is treated, made into Milorganite, or returned to Lake Michigan

Palestine-Israel Newcastle, UK English, Arabic A daughter returns to her father's village in Palestine, which was destroyed in 1948. She journeys through unfamiliar landscapes and is confronted with the reality of her own exile. The Director writes: This is an experimental short film telling the story of one Palestinian's return to her father's village destroyed during the events of 1948. The film examines themes of exile, spatial manipulations, longing, occupation and ultimately, return. There is little dialogue. The footage is textured with a poem I wrote and an electronic score. I flit indistinctly into shots throughout the film in various locations - at the Wall in Bethlehem, in a destroyed house in the ruins of the village of Lifta - but only at the end do I come into focus, collecting a cup of earth and looking straight at the camera: an invitation to reckon with the loss of a homeland. In many ways, the plot happened over seventy years ago, the purpose of this film is bear witness to what has been left behind.