RIVER OF GRASS (Sasha Wortzel 2025)
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IMAGE FROM RIVER OF GRASS
SASHA WORTZEL: RIVER OF GRASS (2025)
All about the Florida Everglades, past, present and future
River of Grass is a term given by Marjory Stoneman Douglas to the Florida Evergades in her 1947 book of that name, an environmental and naturalist text rated ona par with Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring.. Both are books that were bestsellers that also had a concrete effect on the fate of the environment they passionately defended. "River of grass" may also be the translaton of a native American term for the place, which defenders first of all explain is a river, and not a swamp, as detractors, who wished to destroy it, to blow it up, fill it in or pave it over, falsely used to claim. Developers who envisioned an airport built over the Everglades referred it to "a swamp area wesst of Miami," having no sensitivity to the region's crucial environmental value.
In writing the word "falsely" one feels the gorge rising and one realizes that the Everglades are a passionate issue. The book begins with the sentence, "There are no other Everglades in the world." Period. It is a unique ecosystem, it is rich, it is complex, and it is essential to the integrity of the region of South Florida. And developers wanted very much to pave it over, so it had to be passionately defended.
The film is a poetic journey through time and history, in part a poetic reimagining of Marjory Stoneman Douglas' unique, groundbreaking book. This is a journey that reviews the legacies of colonization - of land and indigenous people, and a world of inequity and misunderstanding by the white male controlling minority. The film features a ghostly narrator, vérité portraits of contempoary Floridians, and a poetic, mystical soundscape to evoke a magical natural world we need to know better to more fully understand the meaning of environment, nature, and ecology. The film is also a meditaton on how historical events invade and shape contemporary life.
This quietly impressive work is the first important non-fiction film of 2025.
River of Grass, 83 mins., premieres Feb. 27, 2025 at True/False Festival in Columbia, Missouri.
