Lost for Words was born from a desire to understand and feel nature more acutely. I wanted to find that childhood wonder that can make direct action beautiful again. Along this search I realised that science seen through art, philosophy, but also children's eyes, was a way to rethink our presence on earth. 

In 2020, during a lock down that marked us all, I discovered The Lost words book. This illustrated object simply celebrated words that qualified the nature around me in northern Europe. These words were blue bell, fox, badger, willow, conker, magpie, raven... Common nature names that had been taken out of the Oxford Youth Dictionary in 2007 and to which the authors Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris had given a second life. As I was relearning the landscape around me, it seemed unimaginable to lose ways to point it out, understand it and care for it.  

The philosophy behind The Lost Words - between grief of disappearance and creative action -  became something I wanted to bring to the screen; It is there that I found hope.

Sarah Konrath's (Indiana University) studies show that the level of empathy in younger members of the earth's population has gone down by 40% in the last ten years. Considering the easy access to the hard truths of a world in crisis, this is not surprising. Furthermore, when looking at documentaries that warn of the state of our planet, we quickly notice that catastrophe is written into the fibre of each film, warning and debilitating. The kindness in The Lost Words was what struck me; and its kind but subversive approach is what gave me the desire to make a film that invites us to change our point of view on our position as interconnected earth dwellers.

This is not a film about the book, but a film inspired by its creative and hopeful gaze. It is in this aesthetic of care that Lost For Words inserts itself; holding out a hand to the human and more-than-human. 

This film put me on a path for a long scientific, artistic, and philosophical search. The first thing that struck me as I started the preliminary interviews was that each researcher, each scientist, was looking for a new way of relaying information about the planet. They were eager to delegate the data they worked to collect, to artists and film makers so as to observe a different perspective. They wanted it to be transmitted, understood, maybe even felt by as wide a public as possible. I was inspired to take this opportunity to show what needed to be said, in a new light, translating empathy into film.