Press room

Land Cinema
Wed 5 Nov – Wed 26 Nov 2025
Barbican Cinema
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/series/land-cinema

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.

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”.

Becca Voelcker will introduce each screening and host on-stage conversations with writer Lucy Jones and filmmaker Ana Vaz. 

Garden Films (PG*)+ ScreenTalk with Becca Voelcker and writer Lucy Jones on land cinema, women and gardens.  Magazine Mouth 
US 1983, Dir Anne Charlotte Robertson, 7 min
Five Year Diary: Reel 80 Emily Died 
US 1994, Dir Anne Charlotte Robertson, 27 min
Portrait of Ga
UK 1952, Dir Margaret Tait, 4 min
Garden Pieces 
UK 1998, Dir Margaret Tait, 11 min)
Wed 5 Nov 7pm
Cinema 3 

Explore the garden as a place of personal healing and political growth in this programme of four experimental films and animations. In suburban Boston and remote Orkney, Anne Charlotte Robertson and Margaret Tait filmed their surroundings in lyrical appreciation of the natural world. But beneath their vibrant images lie feelings of loss and anxiety. With diary-like directness, their films document changes in the land, and in senses of self and community, over many seasons and years.

Red Persimmons (Manzan benigaki)(U*)+ Intro by season curator Becca Voelcker
Japan 2001, Dirs Ogawa Productions and Peng Xiaolian, 90 min 
Wed 12 Nov 6.45pm
Cinema 3 

This rapturous and unusual documentary, made patiently over two decades by Ogawa Productions as the collective lived, farmed and filmed together in rural Yamagata, is an ode to rural Japan. It carefully chronicles the growing, drying, peeling and packaging of persimmons. Shot during a period of rapid modernisation in the 1980s, the film immerses viewers in the slower, seasonal world of agrarian tradition. Directed by Ogawa Productions, founded by documentarian Ogawa Shinsuke in 1968, the film was completed posthumously by Peng Xiaolian.

Our Voice of the Earth, Memory and the Future (Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro) (12A*) + Intro by season curator Becca Voelcker
Colombia 1981, Dirs Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, 107 min 
Wed 19 Nov, 6.30pm
Cinema 3 

A vital work of Latin American political cinema, Our Voice of the Earth, Memory and the Future is also a milestone in indigenous land activism. Haunting and expressive, this experimental documentary from Colombia portrays a landscape troubled by centuries of colonialism and reanimated by indigenous resistance. Made over five years by Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva in collaboration with indigenous advisers from Colombia’s Cauca region, the film merges documentary and fiction as it incorporates indigenous modes of storytelling to dramatize a history of imperial land grabbing and grassroots opposition.  

Ana Vaz (PG*) + ScreenTalk (online) with curator Becca Voelcker and director Ana Vaz
It Is Night in America (É Noite na América)
France 2022, Dir. Ana Vaz, 66 min

Ha Terra! 
Brazil/France 2016, Dir. Ana Vaz 13 min
Wed 26 Nov, 6.30pm
Cinema 3 

Two experimental films by the contemporary Brazilian director Ana Vaz explore land as a site of encounter between different species, peoples, and ways of seeing the world. Visiting wild grasslands, modernist highways, and a zoo, Vaz traces how colonialism and modernity have sought to master people, land, animals and plants. Developing a filmic language that is at once political and poetic, she recalls the camera’s historical role in objectifying colonised people and places – and repurposes it to tell other stories of struggle and resistance. 

Land Cinema complements the forthcoming publication Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction by Becca Voelcker published by University of California Press in December. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/land-cinema-in-an-age-of-extraction/paper 

Speakers:

Becca Voelcker
Becca Voelcker is Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BBC New Generation Thinker. She earned her PhD at Harvard University and has lived in Wales, England, Japan and the US.  

Ana Vaz
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian Midwest inhabited by the ghosts buried by its modernist capital: Brasília. Originally from the Cerrado and wanderer by choice, Ana has lived in the arid lands of central Brazil and southern Australia, in the mangroves of northern France and in the northeastern shores of the Atlantic. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and an instrument capable of dehumanising the human, expanding its connections with forms of life –  other than human or spectral. Consequences or expansion of her cinematography, her activities are also embodied in writing, critical pedagogy, installations or collective walks.

Lucy Jones
Lucy Jones is a writer and journalist. She was Deputy Editor of NME.com and previously at the Daily Telegraph. Her latest book Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood was published by Allen Lane in June 2023 and by Pantheon in the US in May 2024. It was a New Statesman and Daily Mail book of the year and was longlisted for the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.