Golden hour fantasies
Responding to We Are Nature by Jaha Browne & Olivia Martin McGuire
We Are Nature, 2022 (Film still)
We Are Nature is not a pandemic film. There are no references to lockdown or to social distancing or to government-mandated once-a-day walks. Instead, it is a short film that captures People of Colour in nature during golden hour. Director of Photography Linda Wu roams with a camera, following people in trailing skirts and billowing dresses as they walk through fields and sit by trees. In voiceover, different people contemplate their personal relationships to the natural world. There are none of the nature-adjacent things that I remember from the first lockdown of the pandemic: the mornings slipping up a hill near my parents’ house; the evenings watching footage of plywood coffins descend into plague graves; the days when I was unable to do anything but push my fists into wet soil, shake the clay loose from my fingers, and then bury parts of my body once again.
And yet, watching We Are Nature reminded me more of my feelings about nature during lockdown than my feelings about nature now, three years on from the start of the pandemic. The film is a meditation on how different People of Colour feel connected to rural landscapes. Directors and producers Jaha Browne and Olivia Martin-McGuine have chosen a cast of People of Colour who are working to make the natural world more accessible to their communities. There is Sabah Ahmed, a mountain leader and co-founder of Summit Special; Sabrina Pace-Humphreys, co-founder of Black Trail Runners; Cherece Cercina of the Create Conscious Community; Cherelle Harding of Steppers UK; and Mary-Ann Ochota, a broadcaster and author. The final figure in the film is the dancer, Aisha Sanyang-Meek, who moves in slow-motion with the swaying branches of trees and the breeze that shakes sun-dappled leaves which dance their own choreography.
The film’s voiceover narration is in conversation with questions that became heated during lockdown. Who has access to outdoor space? Who gets to spend time in a garden or a park? Who is born with an innate right to roam? At the end of We Are Nature, a title card delivers a statistic: only 1% of those using UK National Parks are People of Colour. There are many other statistics that Browne and Martin-McGuine could have slotted into their film. That one in eight British households have no access to shared or private green space at home; that Black people are almost four times more likely than white people to have no access to private outdoor space; that BAME children are half as likely to visit the countryside than white children.
During lockdown, the inaccessibility of green spaces came under scrutiny, but the UK’s history is a long one of contested land ownership; a 2019 study found that half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population. The British countryside is the playground property of lords, dukes and a king. In We Are Nature, a voice asks if they will be shot if they walk across a field. The film’s aspect ratio is constantly moving: the fields, trees, skies and people in the frame are constantly under threat, caught between borders that expand gradually and then suddenly shrink. I think it is partially this contraction of space, and the claustrophobia that comes with it, that brought to mind my mood during lockdown. The ever-tightening borders are a reminder that the natural world can disappear in a moment. It can always be taken away: by the government, by estate owners, by inequality.
But We Are Nature is a fantasy and that also reminds me of being alive in 2020. The natural world captured in the film is poetic and splendid; it is a golden hour version of the great outdoors. Sunshine flares across the camera’s lens as the soundtrack swoons. There are no crisp packets rustling under hedgerows and no distant roar of machinery. The film is an eternal summer. This is a utopian dream, a place where People of Colour can roam without threat or fear. Perhaps it is the nature we deserve, even if we can’t all access it just yet.
Since lockdown lifted and each of us staggered through the last year, the new normal and the new inequalities that a global health crisis left in its wake, I have stopped thinking about the nature we deserve. The golden hour fantasy has disappeared as I pass through nature – ignore it, move around it – and rush through my day, from appointment to deadline to meeting.
I watched We Are Nature as summer arrived back to my city, along with flaky cherry blossom and sunrise birdsong. It reminded me that the right to roam in nature – as the people in the film do – is continually being fought for, and that seemingly empty landscapes are contested spaces occupied by ideology and politics. And it reminded me that nature, that is welcoming and accessible and safe for all, is still a fantasy.
