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Paper short abstract:

I discuss how, in my feature film, Slow Return (2021), I used various strategies, including collaboration and post-production manipulation of images and narrative, to respond to environmental injustice past and present in the "heart" of Europe, thus resituating such concerns from the South.

Paper long abstract:

In making my film, Slow Return (2021), I relied on ethnographic and political practices which I propose to situate and discuss in this presentation. Deciding to make a film about the Rhone River's extremities--a rapidly melting glacier in Switzerland and the river's polluted estuary in southern France--was in itself a conceptual political positioning in response to contemporary environmental conditions and the frequent location of such concerns outside of the North, which I intended to further explore through collaboration with those I had met in the respective locations. Such collaboration resulted in a foregrounding of questions of labor and their legacy in each location, which were represented cinematically using a variety of strategies. In each location, the revelations concerning the connection between labor and environmental change were framed in ways that are divergent from mainstream perspectives, complicating the perspective that frequently positions those who suffer versus those who are responsible. In locating my investigation where I did and pursuing it through ethnographic and collaborative means, I was able to uncover more ambiguous connections between the related phenomena. I propose to discuss two sections of the film that exemplify this strategic ambiguity which I would argue is no less political for the subtlety with which it approaches the environmental question in form and content.