Taiwanese UK/Taiwan Jiugang Island: Unfixed (舊港島:流動的) is a short experimental film exploring the uncertainties faced by a small island community in Taiwan. The film interweaves a reading of a poem by Lin Zhanmei (1821–1868) with 3D scans from the island, offering a glimpse into its everyday life and culture. Jiugang is an island confronting both political and ecological precarity. Despite these overlapping instabilities, a community continues to call the island home. The film Jiugang Island: Unfixed 舊港島:流動的 explores the tension between a location that is both unfixed and mobile under environmental and political forces, yet remains a grounded centre for histories and memories. This resonant interplay is portrayed through a landscape humming with the words and poetry of local residents, both past and present.

Central Victoria Australia, Europe and US Is money responsible for current socio-economic inequities and ecological unsustainability? How might a postcapitalist imaginary address and resolve the socio-economic and political inequities and ecological unsustainabilities of capitalist relations of production based, as they are, on monetary calculations and relations? What might a postcapitalist world without money feel and look like? How might it operate? The film draws on scholarly research to give life to a degrowth, eco-socialist and nonmarket socialist community mode of production of the future. "Film making is generally an expensive and highly technical process, with many (mainly male) collaborators using lots of material and energy in production, marketing and distribution. In line with the content of the film, I chose as simple, easy, at hand and inexpensive ways of proceeding. The whole project except for the soundtrack was made by talented women living within 15 km of where I live. I wanted the film to have a creative flair and be constructive. It needed to be concise and then made as freely available as possible. My findings from screenings in conferences through to small gatherings, indicates that audio-visual communication is a relatively successful way to introduce complicated topics to a range of people and to enable common ground on which to engage with them. At the same time, the simplicity and summary nature of the project has led to certain misconceptions about the sophistications of a community mode of production. Where there is common space for viewers to raise queries with me they can be addressed. In general, employing my film making skills as a form of communication has proved a successful way to convey my ideas and, screened in forums, it has formed common ground on which to discuss really different futures." The filmmakers acknowledge the Dja Dja Wurrung people as the Traditional Owners of the land on which this short film was produced.

London, UK Spiritual Flavours interweaves biographical narratives and spiritual accounts from Betty, Aziz and Ossie (who belong to a Catholic church, a mosque and a liberal synagogue, respectively) with the experiences of cooking in their homes in Ealing, London. The recipes thread narratives of past, present and future aspirations, spirituality and the everyday. Their commonalities and differences are expressed through visual and sonic synchronies and asynchronies. Also, by overlapping soundscapes of cooking and praying, the film develops a rhythmic and affective experience of the relationship between food and religious practices. At the end, Betty, Aziz and Ossie meet, cook and eat together. "This film is part of my interdisciplinary doctoral research "Spiritual Flavours: Reflections on using creative practice to explore food and religion in a multi-faith suburb" (2022). This investigates the relationship between food and religious material practices of several faith communities in Ealing, a suburb in West London, selected to represent different faith and migration traditions. These include a Synagogue, a Sri Lankan Hindu Temple, a mosque, a Sikh Gurdwara, an Anglican church, a Roman Catholic church and an ethnically diverse Pentecostal church. The research developed an arts project, Spiritual Flavours, which comprises a photographic series, a film (5' and 28'), and an artist cookbook. Whilst the photographic series uses a formal approach, devoid of people, to explore the spatial arrangements of commensality within religious buildings, the cookbook and the film focus on participatory engagement and biographical narratives. These bring together a diverse range of intimate experiences of food and spirituality across both domestic and worship spaces, and expose the nuanced ways in which faith, age, gender, identity, migration, community and home intersect. The film also produces a rhythmic and multi-sensory experience through the use of the split-screen technique and the creative mixing of sounds of cooking and prayer." More information available at www.spiritualflavours.com.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.