Geographies of Solitude
Two women on a lonely island off the coast of Nova Scotia: Sable Island. Conservationist Zoe Lucas was an art student when she came there for the first time in the 1970s and has been living on this remote strip of land for decades now, mostly alone. Director Jacquelyn Mills films Lucas on her daily trips around the island to observe the local flora and fauna. Her studies of Sable Island’s population of wild horses, for which the island is famous, and of the biodiversity there in general have made the self-taught scientist an esteemed expert. Collecting the alarming amounts of plastic washing up also forms part of Lucas’s everyday life. (Festival information, Berlinale 2022).
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The Ecumenical Jury of the Berlinale 2022 awards the Forum prize to Geographies of Solitude for documenting the work of Zoe Lucas, who commited her life to collecting and archiving Flora and Fauna on Sable Island, a tiny place far off the coast of Nova Scotia. With remarkable filmic means, immerging into the fibre of biological existence, creating images and sound of tremendous beauty, Mills shows nature on this secluded island as a space of great quiet and of the continuous recreation of life. The discovery that Lucas documents the large amounts of plastic waste in the North Atlantic comes as a shock to the filmmaker and the audience, thus also raising awareness for this dramatic ecological problem. (Photo: © Jacquelyn Mills)