GreeningRozzie recently hosted three Monday night “movie talk” Zoom gatherings. We chose three nature-related movies based on our commonly shared desire during these locked-down, pandemic times to watch something both diverting and uplifting about the natural world. We sent out an invitation to anyone on our lists who might feel like-minded on a Monday evening.
Some folks from the neighborhood joined us for enjoyable post-viewing discussions of The Biggest Little Farm (Mon. 2/1), Fantastic Fungi (Mon. 2/15), and My Octopus Teacher (Mon. 3/1). The movies are a quite beautiful colloquy on the magnificence of the natural world, airborne, on and under ground, and under the sea - something of an antidote to our current virus-subjugated world.
There’s always an allure in the story of dropping everything to “get back” to the land. The couple in The Biggest Little Farm leave their LA jobs to start a farm on a 200 acre spread of land. Their commitment to long-term endeavor in biodiversity, and traditional and sustainable farming methods gives a good jolt to this urban dweller - though I suppose with solar panels on my roof I could claim I’m farming the sun.
In Fantastic Fungi, the not so well-known and seldom identified (at least not by non-biologist me) underground mycelium was a revelation about the networked natural infrastructure and its major role in maintaining life on earth. Along with learning about mushrooms, I find comfort in my newly acquired knowledge that trees “talk” and take care of each other, connecting with each other through communication channels above and below ground.
In My Octopus Teacher, spending a year with an octopus in her natural habitat was a spell-binding window into life in the sea. The narrator (and diver) spins a wonderful (and sweetly anthropomorphized) narrative of chancing upon an octopus as she hides among clam shells at the bottom of the ocean bay just down the hill from where he lives in South Africa. It’s the beginning of a year-long documentation of their evolving companionship as she prevails day-in-and-day-out in her beautiful but dangerous environs. The author/diver has since become a climate warrior.
I make these short reviews by way of saying that the three documentary movies met our intention to talk about things positive in the natural world. The pandemic rages and the planet overheats, but it’s good to talk with each other about the wonder of soil and sea and the age of trees that still stand tall and mushrooms that don’t stop their work of renewal. The intricate networks of connection that we humans navigate are aspects of the larger and indispensable networks that keep our planet spinning.
Now back to work cooling it off… Come join us, if not as a member of GreeningRozzie, at least as a Monday “movie talk” participant. Do you have any other films to recommend in a similar vein to our first series? Give us a shout! Let’s watch, let’s talk!
(Rozzie’s the name, Greening’s the game…)
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