‘Lost for Words’ Film Interview on Nature, Language: Sheffield DocFest

After revisions to the Oxford Junior Dictionary, a widely used children’s dictionary, led to the removal of such nature words as “acorn,” “bluebell” and “otter” in favor of such technology-centric words as “attachment,” “broadband,” and “voice-mail,” writer Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris reacted with their book The Lost Words: A Spell Book (2017). It helped to create a broader discussion and protest about the loss of nature itself, along with a celebration of creatures and plants that share the planet with humans.

Hannah Papacek Harper’s feature directorial debut, Lost for Words, which she also wrote and which is getting its U.K. premiere at Sheffield DocFest on Saturday, was inspired by the book.

The documentary, which world premiered at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, features cinematography by Tess Barthes and editing by Becky Manson. It is a rare visual, audio, and musical experience that takes audiences on a trip through nature and thought. “This poetic journey through language and landscape explores how reconnecting with nature’s vanishing vocabulary can help us reimagine our future with hope,” notes a Sheffield DocFest synopsis.

Papacek Harper and Rétroviseur Productions are handling sales on the project. Watch the trailer for Lost for Words below.

After completing an undergraduate program in film at La Sorbonne Panthéon in Paris, Papacek Harper earned a degree in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Lima, Peru, and now works in film and what she calls “sensitive cartography.” 

“Lost for Words was born from a desire to connect, understand, and feel nature in a creative way,” she says in a director’s statement. “I wanted to find that childhood wonder that can make engaged action beautiful again.”

The inspiration for the movie came during the COVID pandemic and its lockdowns. “I was lucky enough to be able to exile myself at my parents’ where I grew up in the French countryside, and I created a bit of a ritual for myself to maintain connection and order,” the writer-director recalls. There, she listed to Matthew Bannister’s podcast “Folk on Foot,” in which he meets folk musicians throughout the U.K., takes them on walks, discusses music, and then has them make music. One of the shows included Jackie Morris, the aforementioned illustrator of The Lost Words.

“So I started reading it,” Papacek Harper tells THR. “And they did an online live festival to raise money for all the artists who couldn’t work during lockdown. One of the things that they put up during the festival was Jackie Morris doing one of her live drawings of otters while doing an incantation from the book. I was on a really long walk through the countryside, and I just started bawling, because there was something about how all these things intersected within that moment.”

That was the first inspiration for the film, along with the basic idea that “if you cannot name something, you cannot care for it,” she shares. “There was really something much more tender that we are missing from a lot of the work we try to bring to people about the environment.”

That is why the film mentions some shocking information about humans’ impact on nature, but the filmmaker doesn’t confront viewers with too much data. In her conversations with scientists, “it was clear that there was a thirst for them to find new ways to bring their data to the public, because it’s very clear that we’ve gotten past the breaking point,” Papacek Harper explains. “We’ve had the figures for a very long time, but how do we emotionally engage with the public so that they feel that they are tied into those figures? So I didn’t want to overwhelm them with information about the environment. In the end, you can feel that we’re over-informed, but what we don’t necessarily have is that empathetic engagement.” That’s where she saw a key role for the film.

Her and fellow filmmakers strive “to make empathetic tools in a world where empathy is decreasing daily,” Papacek Harper says, pointing out two forms of empathy. “There’s the immediate emotional empathy, and then there’s cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy really demands that you engage with a subject,” she explains. “And to allow people to engage with the subject, it is important to rely on emotional connection and poetry touching them throughout the film.”

The movie also acknowledges that there is a climate crisis, but tries to avoid having viewers frozen with fear. “We need to take into account the crisis. We can’t put it aside, but I was looking for a way for us to step out of that space,” Papacek Harper says. “It nourishes climate anxiety, as opposed to putting people in a position from which they can act. So the film is geared towards the idea that by putting people in a place where they fear, but they also feel that they’re in a connected space with the natural world and the human world, and with each other, they can act for the climate and with the climate.”

Music and sound play a key role in Lost for Words. Composer Leonie Floret and sound from Julie Marechal, Florian Vourlat, Kirstie Howell, Cassandra Rutledge, Heather Andrews, and Zoë Irvine create a soundscape that often gives you the feeling of being in nature or brings you close to nature, thanks to music performed in it. “We wanted to create this immersive sound that invites you into the landscape and gets you wrapped in,” Papacek Harper tells THR.

One recurring element in Lost for Words is children discussing nature and its loss. “Some of the richest parts of the filming were spending time with the kids and realizing how much kids think about things that we don’t expect them to be able to think about,” the filmmaker says. “But if you give them a microphone, they have a lot to say, and they actually say some of the most touching things. I was going to see some scientists and researchers and artists with the expectation that they would have the really constructive thought process. But in the end, everyone comes to the same conclusion. It isn’t rocket science. Connecting to actually work together for our future is a basic concept, and anyone can get it.”

Papacek Harper is working on various new creative projects and ideas. “Like most community filmmakers, I am always working across projects, some geared towards the same sort of subject matter,” she tells THR. “One of them is a film that I’m doing with my mother, which is about hope, and it will be in the Scottish forest conservation project.”

Another part of her work is geared towards looking at the sense of belonging in the world. “That’s more of a hybrid approach to cinema,” the filmmaker explains. “It’s about breaking away and trying to figure out a place in an over-connected world where we feel quite hopeless a lot of the time. A lot of the thought process behind what I do is about how we can have a feeling of agency. But also, what do we do with that power? There has to be a bit of humility in the mix.”