Virtual dialogue with director Sasha Wortzel 10/11
Director Sasha Wortzel reimagines environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s celebrated book, The Everglades: River of Grass, which transformed the public’s understanding of the area from worthless swamps to an essential source of freshwater, enabling the ecosystem to endure, just barely, today.
In the wake of a hurricane, Douglas visits filmmaker Sasha Wortzel in a dream and catalyzes a prismatic study of a wilderness that is home to a rich history and a site of resistance in the face of climate collapse. Wortzel reads Douglas's book and joins prayer walks through the Everglades with Miccosukee educator Betty Osceola, transporting the audience through the watershed past and present. We meet a mother taking on the polluting sugar industry; a Two-Spirit Miccosukee environmentalist and poet; a mother daughter team removing snakes wreaking havoc on the ecosystem; and a family who have fished in the Everglades for six generations.
Interweaving Douglas's writing, present-day vérité, and archival glimpses, the film reveals how this country’s origin story haunts and inextricably shapes contemporary American life, while asking how we might weather coming storms better together.