Berlin, Germany Overflow is about the handling of urban water. It is about social construction of nature, explicitly water and health. The film follows the worldwide unique aeration ship ‘Rudolf Kloos’ as it drives through berlin pumping oxygen into the waters of the Landwehrkanal. Various water experts talk about why we need to aerate these waters while explaining the connection to berlins overflowing canalisation and human centred water terms. How we deal with water relates to what we understand as healthy bodies of water. The film shows the destructive process of urbanisation while giving hope for a healthier city through water sensibility. Why does berlin have an aereation ship? Why do we accept the canals overflowing into the Landwehrkanal? What happens to the health of the waters of the Landwehrkanal? How is it connected to the genereal health of the waters of Berlin and the health of the environment of the city? How is the treatment of urban water human centered? How can a multispecies perspective give room for new understandings of urban health?

Stellenbosch, South Afrida A multidisciplinary approach to understanding gentrification in the historial rural hamlets of Stellenbosch, South Africa The concept artwashing is juxtaposed in this short documentary film to visualize how art can create awareness about the process of gentrification in affected communities is rural hamlets surrounding Stellenbosch, South Africa. A land art project in each of the three rural hamlets of Stellenbosch (Pniël, Raithby, Jamestown) under threat was designed and constructed in collaboration with world renowned land artist, Strijdom van der Merwe and my urban honours students, with the main purpose to use art as awareness creation. In addition, visual arts students created short animation films on the same topic. Gentrification scholarship in South Africa largely focuses on issues of displacement and change in the social and urban character of neighbourhoods. In this film it is argued that the country is lagging in terms of policies and regulations to manage and/or control gentrification. Using the historical rural hamlets around Stellenbosch, namely, Pniël, Raithby and Jamestown as case studies, an argument is presented for incorporating intangible heritage as part of a proposed gentrification management overlay zone for these hamlets. The hamlets have a rich cultural heritage as they were established with the church as key historical landmarks. However, development-led gentrification poses the risk of destroying their heritage in the near future. In the absence of municipal bylaws and South African legislation and policies for the management of gentrification, experiences from elsewhere in the world are drawn upon, to present recommendations to the Stellenbosch Local Municipality on how gentrification can be managed to the benefit of the hamlets.

An investigation into the impact of reintroducing cheetahs to India's Kuno National Park on the neighbouring villagers

Leicestershire UK Sheffield, UK Lush green pastures rich in red clover provide nourishing grazing grounds for sheep and cows on Oliver Lee’s farm. Oli jumps in his buggy with working dogs Tim, Meg and Sally to grapple with the daily manual work of rotational grazing – regularly moving livestock to allow fields to replenish without synthetic fertilisers. Immersing us in a work-life where farming meets conservation, ‘Rotational’ shares an intimate experience of agricultural labour through the coordination of human, animal, and technological realms in a living landscape. Despite the many ecological and health benefits for livestock, wildlife, and soils – is this demanding workload viable for family farms like Oli’s? This film sets out to portray the intimate experience of the labour involved in rotational grazing through the coordination of human, animal, and technological realms in a living landscape. Secondly, the way in which the new agricultural policy in England, the Environmental Land Management (ELM), takes shape at a farm level.

Maryland, USA University of Seville, Spain Grasshoppers have been admired and villainized throughout history. They have experienced significant changes in our world, including those most recently induced by humankind, having to adjust and resist individually and collectively. The film navigates current challenges capitalism has posed on the environment through the lens of this millenary species in rural Maryland. Can grasshoppers show more humanity than humans? This film explores how the current relations of production and intensive use of land affect the environment through the lenses of grasshoppers, a species that has been around for over 250 million years. The filmmakers start from the idea that our world has a form. Mountains, rivers, trees, and bushes… are the result of thousands of years of evolution. They have grown, adjusted, and mutated. But landscapes would not be without human perception, which has always been conditioned to human needs. People have taken whatever they needed from nature to survive and, in the process, have created a way to understand it. Like many other species, human relationships with the environment have never been peaceful. But it has become more violent as the centuries have gone by, first through capitalism organizing spatial relations (land grabs, imperialism) and in recent times because of world population increasing at a similar pace as greed. The film focuses on this evolution, exposing the contradictions of our actions as a species.

Berlin, Germany On an abandoned lot on Osloer Straße, an artist group has proclaimed Berlin‘s first Organisms Democracy. It is a political system in which the power emanates from all citizens of the state. All living beings who inhabit or use the state territory are citizens, with equal rights and equal entitlement to political participation. This right is exercised through human representatives. The short film documentary explores how the notion of care is shaped in the Organisms Democracy‘s more-than-human relations, which problems these forms of care might entail and to what extent they create healthier urban environments for all kinds of beings.

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.

Industrial agriculture has failed to solve hunger, decimated rural communities, and had severe ecological consequences. So why is this model being exported to Africa and promoted in international policy circles? Our film sought to investigate the role of the Gates Foundation and other philanthrocapitalist endeavors in pushing industrial and high tech forms of agriculture on farmers in Africa, and demonstrate how and why these efforts are exacerbating hunger and inequality, rather than solving them. We also wanted to highlight widespread resistance by civil society organizations and farmers, who have been developing and practicing sustainable agroecological alternatives that offer greater promise in ensuring food security and addressing climate change. Rich Appetites Film 1: The Foundation is the first short film in a 5 part series. The other titles in the series include Seeds, Money, Science, and Agroecology in Action. In the process of conducting research for the film series, we identified a number of ways that the Gates Foundation is exerting undue influence over food politics at the global and regional scales--from pushing restrictive seed laws, to shaping the priorities of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Through interviews, we also documented a number of stories about the negative impact Gates Foundation funding has had on many farmers and rural communities, and were able to use the power of storytelling to demonstrate the political and ecological possibilities of agroecology as an alternative model. Film-making allowed us to bring our ongoing research to life in a new way, and to reach new audiences by creating compelling, shareable narratives. In particular, it helped us recognize the need to incorporate real people's voices and faces into this research, to create connections and concern. At times, it was hard to arrange interviews across multiple timezones and with spotty internet connections (especially in rural areas). However, this was important to us to try to include a diversity of voices in the project, without having the budget to travel extensively. We also feel that given the climate crisis, flying to all of these places to interview people is ecologically irresponsible and unjustifiable. We are proud and pleased with how we were able to create global films that are more climate-friendly.

Venice, Italy Italian with English subtitles The short documentary explores the world of culture, nature and gastronomy through the eyes of a chef - Lorenzo Barbasetti di Prun. As he explains his vision - he invites the observer to join him on an adventure for a search of new values of the Venetian Lagoon through the creation of dishes based from wild plants across the marshlands. We carried out the first interviews with the PI of the research and other researchers to gain useful information. Then we filmed a dialogic interview with Lorenzo that spanned 2 hours and which we edited in the film keeping only the audio. For the visual material we invited Lorenzo to shows us the "barene" and the places where he works. Here we continued with more interviews. The main challenges were given by our previous inexperience in making films (most of us were at their first experience), the very limited budget (less than 100 euros), and the very limited time (the film was made in one week after the pitch as a part of a summer school).

Lumbini, Nepal Nepali Sanitation workers are at the forefront of climate change working in increasingly challenging conditions, often without protection. The film was used to document the final performance of 12 sanitation workers in Nepal. The sanitation workers had attended a series of participatory arts workshops as within an international, interdisciplinary research programme 'Towards Brown Gold' that explored shit, wastewater and marginality in five rapidly developing off-grid towns. The performance and film sought to raise awareness of issues affecting sanitation workers, some of the most precarious workers in the world. This is a performance by twelve sanitation workers in Nepal supported by UK artist Alice Fox and Nepali arts-activist Ashmina Ranjit. The performance was just one element of an international, interdisciplinary research programme on sustainable sanitation, wastewater and marginality. The film documents the performers as they travel to the Women of the World festival held in Lumbini Peace Park Nepal in 2022. Can the performance enhance dignity and respect for the local sanitation workforce? support arts-based forms of knowledge making? surface issues of caste and untouchability? or push sanitation worker rights up the agenda? The film gave apparent value and status to the project (from the perspective of these sanitation workers). If we had more time and contacts (which we do now) we would co-produce the film as well as the performance with a local film maker. The film has been a useful teaching tool to commence discussions around sanitation, untouchability and womens labour in conjunction with other more didactic resources.

Portugal French and Portuguese. English subtitles This coming of age film follows Filipe and Hugo while they spend the summer in Trás-os-Montes, Portugal. From childhood memories, lazy summers filled with boredom, to their aspirations of a better life, the film explores the ambiguous relationship these youngsters foster with rural Portugal, and their way they navigate across various identities, languages and terrains. Then Director writes: Film-making was a central component of the project, since the research design. It enabled to create a long term relation with the participants, and to access their memories and imaginations. But also, in a project focusing on the making of places in peripheries, it enabled me to highlight particular landscapes and rural areas' atmospheres and architectures. Portugal is a country of emigration: one in five Portuguese live abroad. In the last decades, the regions bordering Spain are the most affected by these departures In the northeastern region of Trás-os-Montes, a third of the population has left since the 1960s. This is where I met with two youngsters, sons and grandsons of emigrants: Hugo and Filipe. Hugo lives close to Paris and spends every summer at his grandparents’ in Trás-os-Montes. There he reconnects to his roots and the slow pace of the village. Filipe did the same: for years, he spent every summer at his grandma’s before his family eventually moved back to Portugal, a few kilometres from his grandma’s home. But what awaited him once he graduated from the local college? As many before him, he emigrated. When we meet, during the summer 2019, he works in London. In February 2020, the world enters a pandemic Filipe is laid off, he packs and comes back to his village in Portugal. Filipe dreams of new horizons, and the answer lays in front of him of going back to where he was born, Paris. While Hugo, in Paris, dreams of living and working in Portugal but, not in the village, not in Trás-os-Montes This is a film about a region which performs as a shrine, a physical container of memories of happy childhoods and simpler times, that one visits once a year and puts a small bouquet of flowers at its feet. Some stay close-by, and live out of its pilgrims, but very few are able to experience it as a real and viable home.

Yogyakarta, Indonesia Indonesian/English A short documentary portraying the creative response of street artist to environmental issues, especially in urban spaces. The distinctive voices of artists enrich the horizon of the discourse of environmental communication. The documentary argues that collaboration among academia, artists, and the public is pivotal to encouraging people's awareness of the current environment situation. The Director states: This film is part of my doctoral research on the practice of street art in the signification and production of space. It is pivotal as the research (visual) data to investigate the practice of street art in Yogyakarta responding to urban issues, especially environmental problems. Making films during a pandemic situation is very challenging. The social distancing policy restricts outdoor activities and social contact. Besides, I also have to adjust the activities of street artists. We had a lot of discussions to come up with ideas that can be visualized. Making street artworks in public spaces must also involve the public in obtaining permission to use their properties, and at the same time, involve them in the process of visual art making.

Cairo, Egypt Arabic with English Subtitles One of five short films made by young residents of Al Khalifa neighbourhood in Cairo, Egypt. In Through Our Eyes the filmmakers decided to look at their urban environment through the eyes of some local animal inhabitants. Made during the Urban Dreams filmmaking workshop. During their two week mid-year school break in 2023, young residents of the al-Khalifa neighbourhood in historic Cairo. got acquainted with urban wildlife helped by various field visits inside and outside the neighbourhood. The young filmmakers then went on to conceptualise, draft and shoot their short films using their phones, in order to share stories of place that reveal their relationship with Al-Khalifa’s natural and urban heritage. Winner of the International Union of Architects (UIA) 2023 Golden Cubes Award (Audio Visual Category)

Melbourne Australia Timor-Leste In Timor-Leste spring water is central to people’s connections to each other and the ancestral spirit world. Underground flows are the carriers of spirits and the providers of life and well-being to the living. This film follows Simião, a university student, who had been very ill and had almost died when something had attacked him and taken his spirit. With the water’s help, the family had recovered it, and his spirit had been restored to his body. Through ceremony the debt to the ancestral spirits of these healing waters is repaid and connections to more distant coastal springs are honored. As water resources diminish with increasing population and economic pressures as well as global climate change, Restoring the Spirit addresses a subject of ever increasing local and global importance. In many areas water is not only a vital resource but is also endowed with an agency and power that connects people, spirit beings, place and space. It is also understood as central to people's wellbeing and healing processes. As one outcome of over two decades of ethnographic research across the island of Timor, this film provides an intimate more-than-human account of the complex social and ecological specificities of water-focused societies spread across the one of the world’s newest nations, Timor-Leste. The film explores contemporary challenges to the ancient uses, beliefs and rituals associated with water and wellbeing and identifies the ritual ecological practices through which the use and sharing of water continues to occur and guide socio-ecological systems on the island.

Tacoma Washington Neighborhood explores the connections between gentrification and settler colonialism in the historically Black neighborhood of Hilltop, through a BIPOC lens. Hilltop is located in the heart of Tacoma, WA which is on the stolen ancestral lands of the Puyallup Tribe and Coast Salish territories. I created this film as a fellow in the Hilltopia Narrative Justice film fellowship which focused on trauma informed filmmaking. I filmed and edited this project myself and interviewed valued members of my community and the Tacoma community in general. The goal in the approach of making this film was to tell a story about a neighbored that I love as a resident of the neighborhood rather than an outsider.

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?

Montreal, Canada French with English Subtitles While Montreal is often shown as an exemplary city in terms of sustainable urban planning and post-industrial revitalization, this documentary focuses on the revalorization of two former industrial brownfields into green and creative spaces. These large-scale upcycling projects are, however, the subject of much criticism from right-to-the-city organisations. Through interviews, the community activists show how these projects are disconnected from local needs and promote eco-gentrification. The main approach is the filmed interview with the community workers we have been working with since 4 years, , the use of plans of demonstration against the urban projects or landscapes of the daily life allow to document the uses and practices of the space that we wanted to retranscribe by the use of the video documentary, this last one allowing us on the one hand to give voice to the people on the ground and on the other hand, to reveal a lived dimension of the contiguous districts which do not appear in the official narratives.

English Czech Republic The film provides a theoretical reflection on the signifier “change” and its five dimensions: Normativity, Scale and Intensity, Focus, Control and Time. Filmed in Prague, with the integration of archive material mostly related to the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the essay sets out to unpack the significatory complexity of change. The film’s five chapters organize a dialogue between fast-paced and still poetic imaginaries and voice-overs. Analytically and methodologically, the film uses a post-structuralist paradigm to assist theory formation, grounded in, and combined with, an analysis of the content produced for the Mediating Change Colloquium, held in Prague on 20-21 November 2020.

Arabic with English Subtitles Two young men enter into a bet to see if people in their neighbourhood are still kind and will give money to a homeless man. Love Letters are a series of short films telling stories of the place made by young residents of al-Khalifa neighbourhood in historic Cairo shot during 2020-22. The project is a collaboration between Megawra (Athar Lina Initiative) and filmmaker and geographer Jessica Jacobs from Queen Mary University of London and Filmmaker Vitor Hugo Costa (Metafilmes). The project used a unique place-based heritage approach to develop the original stories with the young filmmakers. The original workshop was planned to take place on location in al-khalifa in the summer of 2020 but due to Covid-19 we had to redesign it and move it online. The films were completed in June 2022.

Amazon, Brazil London Uk English The Director writes: ‘The Amazon As A Garden’ attempts to bring faraway places closer together. To begin taking meaningful action to save places such as the Amazon Rainforest, the first step is to properly understand, to relate to it. Here in the West, gardens can be seen as simply a patch at the back of our homes; humble yet unimportant. In the Amazon, the garden engulfs all aspects of life. The ‘garden’ acts as an umbrella term for all the spaces where we interact with nature – natural and manmade. The principles behind each of them, however, are fundamentally the same… I began being fascinated by gardens when I picked up a small gardening job over summer 2020. The fact that it is culturally embedded into our lives that our homes have a garden. I wanted to explore the relationship the humans in the Amazon rainforest have with their 'gardens', which for them are not merely at the back of their homes, but ARE their homes.

Bergamo, Italy Italiano, Bergamasco with English Subtitles The Director writes: The film set out to explore how people’s relationship to the environment and the landscape is so strong in remote and rural areas of the province of Bergamo in Italy, located in the Alpine context. These areas, usually targeted as internal and fragile, affected by a dynamism of depopulation, have been re-discovered during the pandemic by the inhabitants of the city of Bergamo and other cities located in the Milan region. In fact, people could discover unique landscapes and strongly conserved environment with the presence of a lively community profoundly connected to their resources. The pandemic has been an occasion for rethinking the future of these areas through forms of community based tourism, by rediscovering local knowledge and the use of resources for enhancing the development of sustainable forms of microbusiness oriented to agro-forestry and agro-tourism. The characters of the film are the inhabitants of the village of Bossico who descibe their sense of place, strongly related to natural and cultural heritage.

Khmer (Cambodian) language with English subtitles Lina is a garment worker in Cambodia. In April 2021, the country is under lockdown due to an outbreak of Covid-19. Lina is still expected to complete her shift at the factory. When her husband catches the virus, she must race to complete her production quota in record time to help her family before they are taken to a government quarantine camp. The film contrasts the experiences of UK clothing consumers and Cambodian clothing producers during the Covid-19 crisis. During the pandemic, hundred of thousands of garment workers in Cambodia were left unemployed as UK fashion brands and retailers cancelled orders with local suppliers. Workers were left hungry and saddled with mounting debts. As well as spotlighting the impacts of the disruption on Cambodian workers, The Haul considers their constrained responses to this crisis. Global stakeholders described the pandemic as a "wake up call" for the fashion industry and the ILO promised to "build back better" for more just and sustainable supply chains in the wake of Covid-19. However, the pandemic has exacerbated existing trends of informal, insecure, and intense work in the garment industry. In contrast to the lofty rhetoric of the ILO, therefore, "recovery" has been on adverse terms that have weakened workers position in hierarchies and systems of global production and power.

Glasgow, UK Bogota and Medellin, Colombia Sonia Marzi Glasgow University: I started by by asking how displaced women settled in their respective cities, Bogota and Medellin, in Colombia wanted to explore their right to the city. However, through an action research design using participatory filming, the women became co-producers of the film and research and shifted the research topic to what was most important to them. This film reflects on their displacement histories and tells their stories with a special focus on how they shape living in the city now and the challenges of the different forms of violences they encounter in their everyday life.

Italy Bruxelles Three women gather in a basement, around a map of the city of Brussels, to plan something suspicious. They exchange looks of understanding and draw lines and circles on the map in front of them. Just before dawn, they find themselves in the Impasse de la Fidelité where the statue of Jeanneke Pis stands, for forty years locked behind a grid. While one of them stands guard at the street entrance, the others fumble to open the big padlock that keeps Jeanneke-Pis locked up. Finally, the lock breaks. At dawn, in front of Polaert's belvedere, Jeanneke-Pis will be freed, finally be able to see the whole city in front of her. The Jeanneke-Pis depicts a little girl with her hair pulled back in two pigtails, crouching in the act of urinating. Small in size, just 50 cm, it was made in 1985 in order to balance the weight of the male representation of the famous Manneken-Pis sculpture, and to symbolise fidelity between lovers. It is located right in front of one of the city's best known pubs, situated in the Impasse de la Fidelité, a cul-de-sac just 600 metres north of the Manneken-Pis. It is a place you never pass by by chance because it is located in the maze of narrow streets that nestles behind the Stock Exchange. The sculpture, never illuminated by artificial light and barely reached by natural light, is located in a small niche carved into the wall, closed by a gate secured by three padlocks placed at different heights. The aim of the film is to show how even the symbolic representations of bodies in urban space return different rights to the city at the intersection of gender differences.