Courtesy of the filmmakers
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Sasha Wortzel’s debut feature River of Grass, which has been on a tear since its premiere at True/False in March. The film continues its festival run this week at Hot Docs and Margaret Mead. The genre-bending documentary chronicles Wortzel’s engagement with Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s influential conservation screed The Everglades: River of Grass in the present day.
On the clip, Wortzel explains, “This moment takes place around 10 minutes into the film where we are transported to the Florida Everglades, a vast region of interconnected wetlands on the Southern tip of Florida that are at risk of disappearing. Betty Osceola, an environmentalist and educator of the Panther Clan of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, navigates her airboat through cypress canopy teeming with birds and alligators. Drawing on generations of Miccosukee knowledge, she explains, ‘Water has life. It has memory.’ The sun shimmers, glimmers, and bounces on the water's surface, inviting us to listen and lose ourselves in the timeless flow of the ‘river of grass.’”
River of Grass also features vignettes with other Everglades residents facing modern-day environmental challenges in the face of climate change, archival sequences, and Douglas’s writing. Pic is produced by Wortzel (How to Carry Water, nominated for IDA Awards Best Short 2023) and Danielle Varga (Seeds, The Hottest August).