LOST FOR WORDS
LOST FOR
WORDS
Lost for Words is a chorale documentary which celebrates our relationships with nature. It is a scientific film with an artistic heart, that actively invites to explore and reshape our anthropocentric point of view through an odyssey around the UK where we meet artists, scientists, children, the elderly and all different people in between. Their words and philosophy drift organically through the four seasons which each have their own color, sound and feel. By reminding us that we too are part of nature, they bring us to see what we are losing and how to reconnect with it. By observing one landscape closely, the characters explore vast and global questions about our Planet.
ORIGINS
Lost for Words was born from a desire to connect, understand and feel nature in a creative way. I wanted to find that childhood wonder that can make engaged action beautiful again. Along this search I realised that science seen through art and philosophy was fertile ground to rethink the way we inhabit this world.
This all started in 2020 when I was in Lockdown in the middle of the Normandy countryside. I was obliged, as we all were, to slow down; put my feet back on the ground and touch the soil. I had the privilege to notice the nature around me with a slower pace. I would walk every day, down the road, across the brook, through the field and into the tiniest wood. It was at this time of re-connection that I stumbled across the internationally acclaimed book : The Lost Words.
A book which had a strong impact on me as it was both intriguing and unimaginable that we may lose the words that qualify the nature I was then experiencing but also inspiring in the way that it celebrated them. These words were blue bell, fox, badger, willow, conker, magpie, raven... Common nature names that had been taken out of the Oxford youth dictionary and to which the authors Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris had given a second life.
This contradiction between grief of disappearance and creative action is what I wanted to bring to the screen - It is there that I found hope.
I had long been observing our ways of examining and portraying the planetary crisis we are in. Catastrophe was written into the fiber of each film; warning and debilitating. The kindness in the Lost Words was what struck me; and its subversive approach is what gave me the desire to make a film that invites to change our point of view on the crisis we are going through. Not a film about the book, but a film inspired by its creative and hopeful gaze on our relationship to nature.
This put me on the path of 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 that new point of view. They were eager to delegate the information they worked to collect to artists and film makers so as to observe a different perspective. They wanted this information to be transmitted, understood, maybe even felt. And I was inspired to take this opportunity to show all that needed to be said, in a new light, translating this feeling into film.
