Geographies Of Solitude

For the last 40 years, environmentalist and naturalist Zoe Lucas has been living on Sable Island, a slender strip of land off the coast of Nova Scotia, cataloguing its flora and fauna, as well as the growing amounts of waste that wash up on its shores. Director Jacqueline Mills travels there to follow Lucas in her everyday routine, as she wanders the island, observes plants and insects, checks in on seals and wild horses, removes globules of plastic from the sand. They record everything, one with paper and pen, the other via 16mm film, everything here leaves a trace. Mills enters into a relationship with the island too, burying film stock among living roots or attaching microphones to the wooden frame of an abandoned building, helping this place make sounds and images of its own, as ravishing and resonant as all the others. So many things can be gleaned from one small island: the gentle daily grind of science, the concurrent isolation and interconnectedness of any space in the world, the accumulated matter and meaning of a life’s work and a vast ecosystem, the need to make the workings of any documentary visible. A film that never tries to hide what it is: the blissfully organic result of an encounter. (James Lattimer)

Jacquelyn Mills: FOR WENDY (2008, K), LEAVES (2013, K), IN THE WAVES (2017)