Shifting Landscapes
A four-part documentary series
Emergence Magazine presents Shifting Landscapes, a documentary series, directed by Emmy- and Peabody-nominated filmmakers Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, exploring the power of art and story to orient us amid the darkness of our time.
Following a musician, a poet, a writer, and a filmmaker who are each embracing the alchemical power of story to connect and transform us, this series opens ways of being that hold both catastrophe and love as our landscapes change and disappear.
The Nightingale's Song
The voices of nightingales have lit up the forests of England at night every spring for thousands of years. In this film, award-winning folk singer Sam Lee draws on a lineage of traditional folk music to join the bird in spontaneous song as climate change and development threaten it with extinction in the UK.
Aloha ‘Āina
Kanaka Maoli poet and activist Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio immerses us in the concept of aloha ‘āina—a love for and of the land embodied by her poetry, her family, and the movement at the foot of Mauna Kea—as she fights to protect the sacred mountain from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope.
The Last Ice Age
For storyteller Andri Snær Magnason, climate change is like a black hole: so big, it’s larger than language. Retracing his grandparents’ annual spring journey to Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier to witness the loss of Europe’s largest ice cap with his son, Andri searches for the stories that can help us understand our ecological crisis.
Taste of the Land
Since fleeing Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, award-winning documentary filmmaker Kalyanee Mam has spent much of her life searching for a rooted connection to place. Tenderly documenting the people and landscapes of Cambodia threatened by industrialization and development, she awakens an ancestral memory of the taste of the land that lies within her.