A poetic exploration of Derrigimlagh bog, a remote landscape once transformed by technological ambition and now reclaimed by nature.

Dundee, Scotland This film explores the importance of public parks for providing an opportunity to connect with diverse city spaces, provide openness in built environments, support biodiversity and to improve wellbeing. The film explores the case study of Baxter Park in the city centre of Dundee, Scotland. This setting is the focus of an ongoing study exploring creative approaches towards green spaces and sense of place. Using qualitative methods, the film explores the history of the park's development and the importance of archives, oral histories and cultural geographies for understanding our connections to place. Our film set out to explore perceptions of green spaces and public parks, connections to place and changing uses of Baxter Park in Dundee, Scotland. The film also set out to provide an introduction to our ongoing collaborative research project, The Big Back Garden, which examines wellbeing, nature in the city, and creativity. Key questions were: -How do public parks provide opportunities and challenges for city spaces and residents? -How can we explore the use of creative mixed methods for sharing, and reflecting on, park spaces? -In what ways do past and present cultural geographies of Baxter Park, reflect changing local and international connections?

Australia Timor-Leste Tetun/Makasae with English subtitles In Timor-Leste’s Matebian mountain range, farmers participating in the Baguia region’s Ho Musan Ida carbon forestry program grow trees to sell carbon credits to the international market. This reforestation initiative is locally founded and controlled. It is built upon lisan, the deep social relationships people have with each other, their environment and their ancestors.

UK Norway, Austria, Chile A ‘spectral index’ is a mathematical image calculation that renders its subject in false colour. In geological prospecting it is used to identify mineral deposits: a technique of mapping terrain for monetary gain. Combining satellite timelapses with infrared drone footage of lithium prospecting sites, and microscope imagery of damaged camera parts, the film considers how this spectral gaze frames our relationship with landscape, both presuming ownership and assuming its future purpose. Mapping has always been a means of circumscribing property, but in the technics of spectral prospecting, the calculation of chromatic values connects directly with a calculation of financial value. The film was developed following a yearlong collaboration with the Horizon EU research project GREENPEG, who were prospecting for lithium-bearing pegmatites within Europe. During this period, I travelled with the consortium's geophysicists to Norway, Ireland and Austria documenting their work and discussing the techniques they used. In my own studio meanwhile I produced satellite timelapses of the landscapes surrounding copper and lithium mines in Northern Chile, and shot microscope footage of damaged camera sensors. While the time spent with GREENPEG generated a lot of footage, very little of it is used in the final film. During the research process it became apparent to me that I was both highly critical of many of the assumptions that are baked into energy transition, and that my interest was in the planetary scale of the problem. Making a documentary style film about a single scientific project would have failed to address this scale, and unjustly targeted the critique at scientists whose motivations are fair. Spectral Index therefore focuses on the systemic aspects of the imaging techniques used, and the profitability calculation that they enable.

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.

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.

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.

Over 50 countries are actively seeking to expand their territories via the ocean through technoscience and international law

Urdu, Hindi with English Subtitles Karachi Pakistan Edinburgh, UK This documentary delves into the rich and unique ecosystem of mangroves in Karachi, Pakistan. The film follows the journey of a local fishing community who are extremely vulnerable in the face of climate change. Severe cyclonic storms, the frequency and intensity of which are increasing at an alarming rate, have adversely affected their day-to-day life. The film interlinks their precarious lives with climate change, destruction of mangroves, and coastal development projects, and the complete apathy from those in positions of power.