Projects matching: Nick Jordan

Synopsis

Centred on sphagnum moss, TRANSLOCATIONS highlights the mutual aid and reciprocal exchange that exists between species in the restoration of a lowland peatbog. Featuring the voice of botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, and a tactile soundtrack score, the film documents the human and more-than-human life, energies and actions that are transforming an intensively farmed and damaged terrestrial environment back into a flourishing wetland habitat. The film is structured around volunteers moving ('translocating') gathered balls of sphagnum moss from replete to deplete areas of the bog, enabling a keystone species in peat formation and carbon sequestration to thrive and rejuvenate a vital part of the biosphere. Exploring the luminous and vivid characteristics of this rewilded, transitional terrain, the film depicts the abundance of re-introduced sphagnum moss and the dynamic mosaic of co-dependent species that are now thriving both above and below the surface of the bog, from flowering cotton grasses and carnivorous sundews to dragonflies and silk-moths.

Synopsis

An exploratory documentary centred on an historic nonconformist chapel located at the edge of the Pennine moors in Northern England.

Synopsis

Exploring the multifaceted interrelationships between trees and fungi within forest ecologies. Featuring the voice of ecologist Suzanne Simard, and her ground-breaking research into tree and fungal communities, the documentary reflects on the ‘biological neural network’ of forest ecosystems, and how the reciprocal, shared behaviour of mycelium and trees creates a resilient and healthy community of co-dependent species. Official Selection CPH:DOX 2023

Synopsis

Filmed in Tripoli, Lebanon, Concrete Forms of Resistance is a documentary centred upon the city’s abandoned ‘Permanent International Fair’, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the mid-1960s. Progress and crisis, labour and capital, material and memory, are reflected through a very intelligent rhyme between image and sound. The touching voice and words of Niemeyer as a call for life, and the beautiful camerawork as a weaving of ghosts in the present landscapes.

Synopsis

A figure conjures a remedy from jars of spider webs and beeswax, while studying the pages of ‘Micrographia’ (Robert Hook, 1665); the first book to illustrate insects and plants as observed through the lens of a microscope. Commissioned by Folklore Tapes for collaborative project ‘The Art of Magic: re-scoring and restoring objectless index cards from the Museum of Witchcraft’.

Synopsis

Stratum is a film that navigates through post-industrial landscapes on the European Route of Industrial Heritage, from Britain’s abandoned South Yorkshire coal seams to the culturally re-purposed collieries of the Ruhr Valley, Germany, via the former coal-mining region of Wallonia, Belgium. Contrasting the past and present, contemporary scenes are combined with archival film material, alongside audio narration from Miserie au Borinage (directed by Henri Storck and Joris Ivens, 1934), made in the depths of the Great Depression. Official Selection Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2019 - Lab Competition

Synopsis

A documentary portrait of Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research (Braziers), the longest-running secular resident community in the UK. Centred upon insights from current residents and members, the film interweaves scenes of daily life with the natural features, architectural characteristics and diverse cultural history of the community. Set in the wider context of sustainable living and the economics of post-capitalism, Intentional Community explores the 'sociobiological' ideas of Braziers' founders, who established the community in 1950 as a social experiment in group co-existence. Today, Braziers continues to explore and live-out ideas of co-existence, collective work and our place in nature. Edited with a layered, non-linear approach, the composite film makes correspondences between the past and present, combing interior and exterior spaces of the gothic manor house with material from Braziers’ archive of photographs, audio recordings and film. Archival footage includes scenes from a 1964 Situationist gathering, attended by writers Alexander Trocchi, Jeff Nuttall, artist John Latham and psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Intentional Community also explores Braziers’ links to the Common Wealth political party, the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, Kibbo Kift, and Grith Fyrd peace camps, reflecting Braziers’ deep-rooted, progressive social values, educational ideas, ecological awareness and connections to the counterculture.

Synopsis

A film about psychosis and surveillance. A composite of fact and fiction, the film draws upon real-life accounts of a schizophrenic disorder: the belief that ones thoughts are being transmitted and heard by others. Set against the proliferation of mobile phone masts in the urban and rural landscape, the film reveals a fragmented inner world of paranoid delusions and acute anxiety, off-set by revelations of mass surveillance and data gathering by government security agencies. Filming locations include a psychiatric video recording studio, an abandoned broadcast television station and a military base used for mass communications monitoring and interception. Part clinical observation, part psychological horror, the film is driven by a tense and dark electronic score by Lord Mongo, and interweaves the flickering detritus of analogue tape, monitors and studio cameras with layers of sampled archive voices; forming a picture of a psychotic state of mind, entangled in an interconnected world. Official Selection Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2017 - World premiere

Synopsis

A film centred upon the dramatic and volatile landscape of Iceland; interfusing the cultural, political and ecological forces that shape the island. The film combines Iceland's remarkable terrain with two corresponding voice-overs from the past and present: poet W.H. Auden, reading ‘Journey to Iceland’ (1937), and environmental activist Ómar Ragnarsson.

Synopsis

The Rising is a short film which depicts an invasive alien species, Giant Hogweed, as it rapidly colonizes the British landscape. Filmed throughout its annual growth cycle, The Rising captures the plant's dramatic infestation along a lowland riverbank in northern England. Part natural history part sci-fi, The Rising features an atmospheric soundtrack score by Lord Mongo, and presents the alien interloper as both a dangerous toxic menace and impressive natural wonder.

Synopsis

Between Two Rivers is a feature documentary about Cairo, Illinois, a historic river-town with a dark and turbulent past; isolated at the confluence of the Ohio & Mississippi rivers, where North meets South in the heartland of America.

Synopsis

A portrait of two spirited individuals existing on the margins of society, where the mighty Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet. Theirs is a declining economy and a fragile ecology in this heartland region.