Unearthing a green counterculture that resonates across space and time
This November, Barbican Cinema presents Land Cinema, a season of rare films rooted in the global environmentalist movement of the past half-century, which sowed the seeds for climate justice today.
Curated by Becca Voelcker, author of the new book Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction (University of California Press), this season of archive and contemporary documentary shorts and experimental features from Japan, Boston, Orkney, Colombia’s Cauca region and Brasília spans over 60 years and introduces an urgent genre for our time.
Diving into little-known regions and archives, Land Cinema unearths a green counterculture that resonates across space and time. Ranging from filmed garden diaries to indigenous documentaries about farmers’ rights, the season includes works by Anne Charlotte Robertson and Margaret Tait, Ogawa Productions and Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, plus a celebration of contemporary Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz. The season includes:
Red Persimmons: The film immerses viewers in the slower, seasonal world of agrarian tradition. Directed by Ogawa Productions, a collective founded by documentarian Ogawa Shinsuke in 1968.
Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future: Haunting and expressive, this experimental documentary from Colombia portrays a landscape haunted by centuries of colonialism and reanimated by Indigenous resistance.
Becca Voelcker, Curator of the Barbican’s Land Cinema season, said, “We are surrounded by anxious images of climate breakdown and injustice, and it can be hard to know how to act. Today more than ever we need to open horizons of possibility rather than foreclose them. A closer look at history reveals that there have always been alternatives, self-seeding in even the most paved and polluted of places. Made in resistance to extractive capitalism, and in imaginative and practical approaches to the future, films that belong to a genre I am calling ‘land cinema’ activate a way of thinking that is both critical and creative”.
Booking and full details: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/series/land-cinema
