Join us on Thursday 8 December for our last Film at Cample screening of 2022: Jacquelyn Mills’ beautifully evocative Geographies of Solitude — a portrait of the remote Sable Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. 

For this special event we were joined at our in-house screening by Moniaive-based singer/songwriter and herbalist, Sarah Jane Scouten, who shared some Canadian folk songs along with some of her own after the screening, and also made a festive herbal tea blend using Scots Pine needles, Rose hips and Hawthorn berries, with ingredients foraged around her home in the Dalwhat Glen. 

You can watch a recording of Sarah Jane’s performance here.
Or view Sarah Jane’s tea recipe here.

Geographies of Solitude is an immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, guided by naturalist and environmentalist Zoe Lucas who has lived over 40 years on this remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. Shot on 16mm and created using a scope of innovative eco-friendly filmmaking techniques, this feature-length experimental documentary is a playful and reverent collaboration with the natural world. Zoe leads us among wild horses, seals and bugs, through peaks, valleys, roots, sands, weathers, seasons and stars. The intangible is evoked with hidden sounds and vanishing light. Much like a field book, the film tracks its protagonist’s labor to collect, clean and document marine litter that persistently washes up on the island shores.

“I don’t know what the solution is to our environmental crisis, and I don’t necessarily consider myself a political filmmaker. But it breaks my heart that the world is in the state it’s in environmentally. If we can experience what is sacred in nature, and the wonder of the natural world, I believe we would have ‘less taste for destruction’, as Rachel Carson would say. That’s why I made this film. To work with our current reality. Can we honor places? Can that inspire us to treat them with reverence?” – Director, Jacquelyn Mills