About this Event
We are thrilled to announce the Bioscope Screenings. In partnership with Emergence Magazine, we will show their four-part documentary series 'Shifting Landscapes', exploring how art and story can transform our relationship to nature.
About Shifting Landscapes
Shifting Landscapes is a documentary film series, which explores the power of art and story to orient us amid the darkness of our time. Following a musician, a poet, a writer, and a filmmaker who are each embracing the alchemical power of story to connect and transform us, this series opens ways of being that hold both catastrophe and love as our landscapes change and disappear. Responding to great changes within their landscapes—the vanishing song of the nightingale in southern England, the desecration of a sacred mountain in Hawai‘i, a melting glacier in Iceland, and a traditional way of life threatened by development in Cambodia—they create art that can help us understand the changes beginning to affect the places we call home; and offer stories that open us to our connection with the Earth.
Screenings are scheduled across four dates.
10:30 - 11:30
11:30 - 12:30
12:30 - 13:30
14:30 - 15:30
January 31, The Nightingale Song
In The Nightingale’s Song we meet Sam Lee, a British folk singer who joins nightingales in song during their mating season each spring. As climate change and development threaten their habitats, nightingales may disappear from England within fifty years. What would be forgotten, Sam asks, if we no longer heard the call of this beloved bird? The film follows Sam’s journey of becoming a traditional folk singer; and follows him to the woods of southern England where he sings with nightingales as both an act of rebellion against their imminent extinction and an expression of love for the living world.
February 14, Aloha ‘āina
In this film, Native Hawaiian poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio invites us into the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) concept and practice of aloha ‘āina—a love for and of the land. The film traces the ways aloha ‘āina flows through the themes, intention, and delivery of Jamaica’s poetry, her work in defending and restoring the sovereignty of Kanaka Maoli, and her involvement in the movement to prevent a thirty-meter telescope from being constructed at the summit of Mauna Kea—the most sacred mountain in Hawai‘i.
March 07, The Last Iceage
As storyteller Andri Snær Magnason puts it, climate change is like a black hole: so big it’s larger than language. We understand it not by looking straight at its center, but by looking at its edges. In The Last Ice Age, Andri retraces his grandparents’ annual spring pilgrimage to Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier, searching for the stories that lie at the edges of our climate crisis in both scientific data and his family’s memories. Witnessing the inevitable decline of Europe’s largest ice cap with his son Hlynur, Andri pulls on the ties of love that connect generations to try to grasp what the immense changes he has seen in just one lifetime will mean for the future of the planet.
March 21, Taste of the Land
Since fleeing Cambodia with her family during the Khmer Rouge regime, documentary filmmaker Kalyanee Mam has spent much of her life searching for a rooted connection to place. This film traces her experiences of becoming displaced from Cambodia; assimilating to life in Stockton, California, in her childhood; connecting to her origins through language and food; and telling stories through filmmaking of people who are suffering disconnection from land because of conflict, development, and industrialization. Taste of the Land ultimately follows her to the landscapes of Cambodia—which have been changing through deforestation and urbanization—where her tender documentation of the disappearing, relational ways of life that these places have held has led her deeper into spiritual relationship with her homeland.
About the Bioscope
The Bioscope is a building folly by Studio Biocene set in the St Andrews Botanic Garden, and the locus for experimentation with new living materials - biohybrid panels grown from microoganisms.
The Bioscope was conceived as a shelter, with a vision of creating an ornamental structure that punctuates the garden while merging with the existing glade. Dappled sunlight from the neighbouring trees and shadow play of the interlocking components invites observation and contemplation. The interior perspective permits us to momentarily inhabit this unique place of the garden, allowing a different perspective on the surrounding biodiversity through the macrostructure of the walls.
More information here: https://www.studiobiocene.com/project/bioscope.
About Emergence Magazine
Launched in 2018, Emergence Magazine is an award-winning magazine and creative production studio that explores the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Our work gathers voices—both human and more-than-human—with the potential to shift ways of thinking and being in relationship to the living world. Widening the frame of what a magazine can be, we offer storytelling and art across traditional and emerging mediums, from the dynamic and digital to the physical and intimate. Bearing witness to the change, loss, and possibility of our time, Emergence Magazine illuminates the ways in which humans are continuous with—and wholly dependent on—the living Earth.
Our work has received numerous recognitions, including Webby awards and nominations, National Magazine Award nominations, Peabody and Emmy nominations, and Gold and Bronze medals from the European Design Awards. Our films and immersive work have been presented at film festivals, including New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, IDFA, Melbourne Intl Film Festival, Hot Docs, and Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, among others, and our work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian and the Barbican Arts Center.
Contributors include Sundance- and Emmy-winning filmmakers, MacArthur Genius Award winners, Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists, Booker Prize winners, poet laureates, Ted Prize winners, and acclaimed international writers, filmmakers, artists, and photographers.
Emergence Magazine is an editorially independent initiative of Kalliopeia Foundation. We are located on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people of present-day Marin County.
To increase accessibility, we have chosen a donation based system. As a small charity venturing into art and cultural events, we would be incredibly grateful for your support which would help us cover some of the costs of our programme. Any contribution would be much appreciated. If you would like to attend, but affording a ticket is a barrier, please feel free to book a free ticket - we care deeply about making our programme accessible to those who would otherwise face barriers to access. All donations and ticket sales are essential in allowing us to continue offering events such as these - we're grateful for all our supporters who attend our events and are advocates for our work.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
St Andrews Botanic Garden, Canongate, St Andrews, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00 to GBP 16.96
