What does ‘nature’ mean to us – and what might it represent? Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė’s patient, quietly subversive feature inverts the usual nature-documentary clichés as it explores a region that fits few people’s idea of beautiful.

 

The Curonian Spit is a slender stretch of land connecting Lithuania with Russia, who share possession of its 60-mile length. Along it lies a deeply unlikely tourist attraction: a dying forest of leafless trees, left dry and lifeless by the acidic shit left on their branches by thousands of native cormorants. In Barzdžiukaitė’s careful film, what looks like a grey, apocalyptic wasteland on Lithuania’s otherwise scenic Baltic coastline becomes a Rorschach blot for human visitors from all over the world, whose divergent speculations about the birds and their habitat comically reveal their own ambivalent relationship with the natural world.

This is an ICA Exclusive project. The UK Premiere of the film on Friday 8 July is followed by a Q&A with the film’s director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and co-creator Dovydas Korba.