ECRÃ FILM FESTIVAL 2024: Interview with Marianna Milhorat, director of Just Above The Surface Of The Earth (For A Coming Extiction).

 

    

I was very touched by how your film dealed with the idea of conserving and preserving the natural world. What drew you to this theme and how has it developed over your career as an artist?

Marianna Milhorat: Throughout my work I have been very interested in the shifting relationships to landscape, and with this film I´ve particulary turned to the conservation landscape. And just thinking about what does it mean to look at images of modern conservation efforts, and what kind of insights come out of that. And what can we gleam about the future and the way that we´re moving, how to approach different ways of thinking about these efforts. So I started with that, with that premise of what does it mean to look at modern conservation efforts, and some of the absurd images that come out of these efforts. 

But as I began going out with some of the participants, I was really moved by the experience of what it actually is they are doing, what is the experience of spending an hour out in the fiel listening to frogs with a group of retirees, you know? And through that I began thinking more about the nature of hope and empathy. And how those elements might be the possibilities of having a different sort of future and a different relationship to the land and non-human beings. 

I wanted to ask, how did you came across this specific group of people? I was very moved by how these participants presented themselves, specially one of the main protagonists, Marnie Baker,(who sadly passed away recently) who writes and recites haiku poetry during the course of the film. How did you meet her? And how long did it take for this process to transform into the film itself?

 

Marianna Milhorat: Well, at the time I was beginning the film I was living in Chicago in the U.S. And in the midwestern part of the U.S., for reasons of funding I think, there are a great number of citizen science initiatives. I believe that they reflect this long history of conservation work done in the midwest. And then in the mid-2000s when white noise syndrome, which is a disease that affects bats, started to appear in the U.S., it began on the east coast and it was slowly working it´s way west. So in Wisconsin in particular it began to appear initiatives made to begin monitoring the bat population so that they could see how this disease was really affecting the bat population before it hit the state. So there´s a lot of citizen science initiatives revolving around bats and frogs. 

So I connected with some of these citizen science programs, and they put me in touch with different individual groups. So the frog monitoring initiative happened through the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museaum in Chicago, and they have a number of different science groups who are involved in frog monitoring around Chicago and across Illinois. So I went out with a few different groups and I particulary loved that group of women who were the frog monitorers in the film, they had such a unique dunamic amongst themselves and they were just so welcoming, by allowing me to spend time with them and go out on multiple occasions with them. 

And I´ve connected with different science and citizen science programs around bat monitoring in Oregon and Washington. So I´ve connected with some researchers at the University of Santa Cruz and I shot partly with them and partly with citizen science initiatives, who were also contributing data to their research. And from that it kinda of brach out and spiraled, when I went out with one group, they connected me with others and so on. 

One thing that I felt while watching was the experience of a very immersive way of filmmaking, with the use of P.O.V shots following the trails of the participants, but there are also moments where the geometry of the camera and the fixed position it has is much more static, like for example in the scenes of the group researching the beach. How did the visual language of the film developed over it´s making?

Marianna Milhorat: Yeah, so I was really interested in creating these movements from the more observational style to the more lyrical one where audience members would shift from observing these people, from looking at their actions and maybe reflecting upon what they mean, or what they think about them, to then perhaps going being the observers themselves. Being caught up in the present moment. For example, in the extended shot of the frog ladies, as they are standing there for five minutes listening to the frogs, you might begin by looking at them, observing them and thinking about who they are and what their actions mean, to then becoming the one who is listening to frogs yourself, you know? 

And then this kind of slippage into P.O.V shots of camera and then a more lyrical approach in the montage happens during the film. There is a kind of film that only shows and talks about facts and figures of the decline of these animal species, but I didn´t want to make that type of film, I think there are enough films out there about this topic and I wanted to focus in particular in these group of people and do justice to the struggles and efforts to adquire information. And moreso it was this idea of creating these sort of embodied experiential moments for the audience, and how the experiential is a gateway to these new forms of empathy, and new ways of relating to the places around us. And also of a possible new way of thinking differently about the future, and devoloping new ways of being and relating to the world. So it´s a film that very much moves between the observational and the lyrical. And that´s what I was hoping would be the outcome. 

Seeing this film in Brazil, with a very receptive brazilian audience, was very moving because we also deal very similar difficulties of maintaining and conserving the natural environment, especially in regard to the Amazon and it´s process of deforestation. Because of the universal aspects of your film, I wanted to ask: are there any other places in the world, or in your own country, that you would be interested to go and create new films?

Marianna Milhorat: Yeah, absolutely, filming in Amazon would be incredible! But... part of the reason the film was shot at night, or the bulk of it was shot at night and pre-dawn hours, was to allow the audience to witness the landscape in a transformed new way. So as a filmmaker I am interested in going to other places that will provide the same kind of effect, this certain uncanninness. And of course there´s always the question of what is your relationship to a certain place, a certain country, and in my case I´m American-Canadian, so I´m thinking of creating a new work centered around Quebec. A work centered around the aquatic deadzones of that regions, the midpoint where the St. Lawrence River meets the ocean. 

I´m very philosophically interested in these kind of spaces, what they can do to make us think of a new way of relating to our environment. Right now, I am in the beginning of starting the post-production of a work that was shot in Finland. That is centered on a behavioral testing event for dogs, where the dogs would meet these large remote controlled taxidermy copies of bears and wolfs. So the owners would bring their dogs to see how would they respond during an encounter with those ''beasts.'' And it´s suppose to simulate how they would react if they meet them in the wild. It´s a very visually absurd event. So I am interested in the possibilities that, for example, artistic residencies in different countries hold in allowing opportuinities to connect with different communities. And export these ideas in other locations. 

How has been the experience of sharing this film in festivals, and how do you see the reception and importance of the film with the current political and enviromental challenges that our world is facing?

Marianna Milhorat: Well, the film is actually at the very beginning of it´s festival run. So the Ecrã Film Festival was it´s first place to premiere. And then it will have it´s European premiere and U.S. premiere in August, so it´s yet to be determined. But as you were talking about the film´s reception in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil, that is fascinating because I am interested in the conversations that happen when this film is screened to different communities that have different relationships with the issue of enviroment in a local level. Because part of me was wondering: "Is this film very american?" So I´m very interested to follow up on that question soon as the film begins it´s tour!