Program selected by Filma collective and nadiya chushak
Text: Iryna Zamuruieva
Illustration: Ivanna Prokopchuk

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, wizards can only perform magic when they know the true names of plants, animals, and birds. Watching this year’s Filma selection, I think of its eclectic characters—all the farmers and ethnopharmacologists in Martinique and Colombia, a performer in Brazil, a bird that no longer exists, a swamp that seemingly still does—and wonder what it means to know the true names of those around us.

For the residents of Martinique in You Think the Earth is a Dead Thing, knowing the names of plants is essential to survival. Their island, slightly larger than Kyiv, is twenty-five per cent covered with banana plantations, established by descendants of French colonizers. The film shows locals engaging in alternative farming methods and cultivating medicinal plants in ways that do not harm the environment. However, their struggle extends beyond the presence of the plantations, to confront the widespread use of chlordecone—a toxic pesticide with a harmful colonial legacy that continues to contaminate the soil, endanger human health, and threaten lives of other creatures on the island. Knowing plants by name is ultimately about distinguishing what heals from what harms. At the beginning of the film, one of the protagonists cuts a branch from a cinnamon tree, explaining, “My friend is leaving soon. I'll give him a clipping to put in his suitcase. Maybe it'll grow well there.” Cinnamon bark has medicinal properties and can reduce inflammation. Yet, this knowledge is more than ecological; it stems from an awareness of the political systems that perpetuate violence and toxicity.

In Who Is Afraid of Ideology? Part 3: Micro Resistencias, one of the narrators wraps fresh fruit for Mariana to take on her journey. The journey is troublesome. Mariana has to go into hiding after armed pro-government militants come to her home one day. Together with other local activists, she has been fighting the expansion of sugarcane plantations and the fishing industry. Their resistance is not about slogans but about direct action—reclaiming the stolen land. Mariana came together with her community to share knowledge about edible local plants and seeds. Eventually, this collective wisdom and skills led to her persecution.

Uýra, a performer, artist, queer ecologist, and Indigenous Brazilian, is the protagonist of Uýra – The Rising Forest. She holds and shares a deep and intimate knowledge of the Amazonian rainforests. In one scene, Uýra hosts a group of young people from the Amazon Basin in the forest. A playful yet serious conversation about protecting trees and the colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples flows into a magical ritual, with bodies painted in vivid colors and costumes crafted from twigs, bark, and flowers.

At this point, I catch myself wondering why I’m still glued to my laptop instead of wandering around the forest with a fern leaf (or maybe two) perched on my head as we all try to figure out why central squares in both my hometown of Kropyvnytskyi and the depths of the Amazon are graced with monuments to random men who have absolutely no connection to these places.

Some events in the film take place in Manaus, in a neighborhood where, as Uýra explains, she experienced her first friendships and loves. Yet this same place is marked by violence against people like her. While Mariana in Who’s Afraid of Ideology? is pursued by unknown armed men, Uýra recounts the institutional violence inflicted by the state, represented by the police.

The exploitation and violence experienced by the environment, women, and all non-male or non-white individuals, have long been explored in feminist studies, particularly ecofeminism. Ecofeminist thought argues that these forms of oppression stem from the same forces: capitalism and patriarchy, which depend on “cheap nature” and “cheap reproductive labor.” In the first three films of the program, we witness grounded strategies of resistance to this dynamic. Here, knowledge of plants is not solitary magic but a collective effort to understand the intersecting violence of patriarchal, racialized, capitalist, and imperial systems—and to strive toward a less toxic, more equitable world.

In the short film zong, we follow a nonlinear—and, according to legend, cursed, once incorporated into Soviet industrialization, and now enmeshed in the realities of the climate crisis—history of the Zamglai wetland in the Chernihiv region. According to the "legend" quoted from archival sources by the film’s creators, Zamglai was originally a river until a woman, seeking revenge for the drowning of her daughter, turned it into a swamp (as if a swamp were merely a lesser form of river, rather than a fully-fledged ecosystem in its own right). However, focusing solely on the performative aspects of the ritual risks overlooking an important detail: the "legend" is actually a form of historical narrative (perhaps even artistic documentary), an oral tradition passed down to preserve knowledge about the region and its events. It is entirely plausible that Zamglai was once part of the Dnipro River, which created its floodplains.

However, when we look at today’s Zamglai from above, its shapes still seem strange for a swamp. The neat rectangles clearly indicate peat extraction. In addition to being a naturally rich ecosystem, peat is ultimately a fossil fuel; its extraction releases carbon that has accumulated over millions of years into the atmosphere, which, in turn, contributes to climate warming. My language lacks a word to describe the destructive consequences of a swamp becoming the sky, but perhaps it’s time to come up with one.

In Leena Habiballa's Dead As A Dodo, there is no magic at first glance—only brutality, absurdity, and the permanence of extinction. In a five-minute collage, millennia of the bird’s life flash before our eyes, collapsing into a single moment of nothingness. Yet Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us of another skill, only available to dextrous wizards—the ability to become invisible. Unfortunately, in this story, the Dodo is not the one practicing the skill of invisibility. It is the Dutch Empire, whose expansion led to the Dodo’s extinction. The empire attempts to lull us into indifference: "We had nothing to do with it, the Dodo died on its own. Well, maybe it was eaten by our dogs—but dogs aren’t the empire, and besides, what empire are you talking about?" But Leena Habiballa is not easy to fool, as she lays out the material evidence of imperial colonial violence frame by frame—the illusion is shattered.

Yet, the Dodo did not vanish in a flash. The extinction of any species is usually preceded by a long, painful, and solitary period, which can stretch for years or even decades, turning life into a struggle for survival, ultimately reducing it to nothing. In the years before the day the Dodo was last seen, it probably starved as colonizers were destroying its native forests on Mauritius and capturing its relatives. The Dodo was now forced to quickly learn how to protect its nests and chicks from the colonizers' cats and dogs. But it was unable to adapt, through no fault of its own. This story teaches us that resources for resistance are finite; one can become drained, weakened, unable to go on.
Knowing the names of other creatures in this world goes beyond just recognizing others; it’s a reflection of our own ability to see, hear, and truly comprehend one another in all our genuineness, ambivalence, and multiplicity. Learning the true names of our fellow humans and all living beings is merely the first step, but without it, there can be no real progress toward social and ecological justice.