Our Land

In 2024 some of our favourite films included titles like Here, The Outrun, Janet Planet and About Dry Grasses, all of which used the grandeur and the detail of every mossy hillock and roaring wave to help give a voice to the inner lives of their characters. 

Moving away from fiction, the documentary form is an especially rich tool and one which, instead of using nature to move along a narrative, can instead give a much-needed voice to the landscape itself.  

With this in mind, we want to start 2025 with a pairing of two new documentaries which use the form in very different ways to explore the impact of human activity on the natural world. 

Beginning with the micro, the desperately beautiful Nocturnes follows a small team of scientists working in the Eastern Himalayan forests to observe moths. Night after night using photography to document the different areas each sub species of moth calls home, this nuanced film makes space to consider the direct consequences of climate change on our ecosystem.

Then tripping away from the forest and landing in the heaviest depths of the earth we have Architecton, a study in concrete and stone, as far away from the light tripping flight of the ethereal moth as is possible. Architecton is a weighty exploration of the way in which we have pulled apart the materials below our feet to create structure after structure which towers above our head. Consider for a moment the violence of this act and the life span of these buildings? Where is the balance in this, and where that balance has been lost in our contemporary, often throwaway approach to architecture, can it be re-found?  

Nocturnes and Architecton are a fascinating pairing, each looking at the way in which people affect our planet in very different but complementary ways. Neither directly shouts an opinion, each makes a form of space for us as an audience to think, to consider. What we do next is up to us.

Nocturnes comes to HPPH on Tue 21 Jan at 18:15 and Architecton is showing on Tue 04 Feb at 18:00.