Exploring the Impact of Lost for Words Documentary Directed by Hannah Papacek Harper

Inspired by the original book The Lost Words (2007) by Robert McFarlane and Jackie Morris, Lost for Words embarks on an exploration of nature, revealing its complex reality. Harper's approach reverses the traditional 'humanity towards nature' perspective, instead offering a view from 'nature towards humanity.' Through its sequences, the film assigns a new role to nature's connection with us, moving away from an anthropocentric viewpoint to one based on spontaneous and mutually beneficial interdependence. Harper and her team, along with the people and organic life forms featured in the film's diverse landscapes—often unheard voices—aim to feel and listen to the countless voices of the natural world and actively engage with their influence on our lives.

Harper's uniquely designed intersectional process, where artistic creation and scientific methods are equally valued, has produced a sensitive and poetic depiction of how life can flourish through a conscious embrace of the Earth and its boundless potential.

In Copenhagen, I had the opportunity to sit down with Hannah Papacek Harper to discuss the ideas and methods behind her debut feature documentary.

Loreta Gandolfi: Hello Hannah, it's wonderful to meet you and discuss Lost for Words. Before we dive into a detailed conversation about the film, I'd love to hear about your background.

HANNAH PAPACEK HARPER - Both of my parents are artists: I grew up within visual arts. I think everyone was thinking I was destined to do something in graphic arts just out of habit. But I needed to find something that was my voice. I was part of a generation where we got small digital cameras and could go off, film stuff and make things. Luckily, I had a few inspirational teachers around arts that asked us to do stuff. My music professor asked us to make something that went to a piece of music, and we got to choose which one was out of the three pieces. I was smitten with Smetana's Moldau.

It felt very much like looking at dance and music and the landscape altogether. It was already about exploring the local landscape, and I remember thinking: ‘oh, this is something that we can do, edit and find rhythm, and express something through tempo and imagery’. Then, in High School, Film was the only creative class. So, I did cinema to try, and since that time, I just didn't stop. It felt like the appropriate voice to speak with. I think it's the closest thing to having all your senses activated and to get closest to life itself. My curiosity about life itself, and trying to understand and penetrate those questions, were most appropriately explored through film.

Loreta Gandolfi: Reflecting on your earlier projects, the experimental short films Just Listen to The Storm and Vegetative: could you describe the progression and development leading up to Lost for Words?

HANNAH PAPACEK HARPER - I was working as a technician before. I have always wanted to direct, but there were lots of limitations between being a technician and being a director and there was a moment during lockdown when I felt that it was possible to make things very easily. I made some short films on my own with what I had; it made me feel good to be able to just produce small things that felt meaningful.

In the end, that's how we started building Lost for Words. We just set out with a little bit of equipment. We went on this adventure together, knowing that it was the contact with the outside world and with people that would permit things to grow; eventually the film did so, it grew into a much bigger project. It was very much a grassroots approach, so I think that to do those two shorts earlier on allowed me to believe in the fact that in a grassroots way you can make cinema still, and you can still build something into something bigger if you want. It was a real collective force. Also, I think that I crave the collective force because a lot of the directing, once I went straight into full time, is quite solitary. As a result, sharing the research, sharing that search and the questioning as opposed to staying in my little world is what the shorts are based on – basically, psychogeography or poetic geography, which is trying to see how places shape us, and how we shape places, and how those things can be in resonance.

Loreta Gandolfi: How did the unique idea for the film come about? Also, could you discuss the passion for words and the choice of the title?

HANNAH PAPACEK HARPER - Well, I think that the lockdown was again the catalyst. It was a moment where I changed my work a lot, and those with the privilege took different decisions for their futures. I think, at that time, if they could, they might change a little bit the dynamic of their lives. I spent a lot of time thinking about our contact to nature, and one of the things that I found was this podcast called Folk on Foot: Matthew Bannister, revered BBC presenter, brings folk musicians into their local nature; they walk and play outside. It was a simple, yet beautiful concept and there was something about it that was very reassuring, and through that I discovered the book, The Lost Words, and it stayed with me. I found it a beautiful piece; it deeply touched me seeing Jackie do her performance where she draws the otters and recite the incantation that was online at the time. The first time the Spell Songs did their show after the lockdown in the Natural History Museum I decided to write to them. There was something deeply moving about that sensitive approach that could touch so many people. I asked myself: ‘What can we make with this? How can we make a film that could do the same thing?’

Loreta Gandolfi: Could you explain the link between the idea of losing words and the current state of the earth and ecological concerns?

HANNAH PAPACEK HARPER – As you probably have read about and seen in the film, The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris was born from the taking out of about 50 common names from the Oxford Youth Dictionary, which is the dictionary that children use to learn their first vocabularies and to be in contact with the world. About 40 of those were nature words: bluebell, acorn, snow, fern, heron, fox, otter, badger, willow, raven, wren et.al. All these are common nature words for the northern hemisphere in Europe.

There was a bit of an uproar when it happened in 2007, but it died down quite fast, and the authors were the two people who decided it was important to persevere in making this book. Their book celebrated those words, instead of alarming people. What they did was to reintroduce them into the language of children in their own way, without dulling down the language, using tasty language, using things that roll off the tongue in a specific way, so that children could have fun with it and say it aloud and invoke the natural world. They still played around with the absence. So, they had paintings of absence, and then paintings of presence, and that went through the whole book. Jackie herself says ‘it is a beautiful piece of subversion’, because it really is a poetic way of bringing people to understand something that is being lost, but without drawing them towards a catastrophe, and instead, drawing them more towards a celebration of nature. That was the baseline of the film: how can we look at this, this model of communication, and make it into a visual piece?

The idea was basically to invite people to rediscover the landscape with more wonder and more empathy, and the wonder of a child; that's why the children's voices are so important in the film. The book itself was such a big phenomenon in the UK, and it got distributed in all the primary and secondary schools. Everyone has it in the school system now, it's used for outdoor learning. It's used for all sorts of workshops and grassroots movements, and it is used to get people involved.

Musical projects are born from it; theatre productions are born from it. I thought that if we look at the webbing of that, it's already huge. So how much more of a web can we draw of how people look at the landscape differently in one territory? I decided to just use the UK, as an example, not going to look for faraway nature, but instead looking at local nature in one territory, how people are connecting to it. Surely, there are so many more landscapes we could have shown, but we already want to show people how rich it can get in one small place like the UK, where the nature in the book was local nature.

Loreta Gandolfi: Your film presents a world filled with many individuals.

It includes elderly residents in an Alzheimer care facility, as well as people across Scotland and the UK, including academics, researchers, artists, and importantly, 'ordinary' individuals. What led you to decide that incorporating all these perspectives was crucial for your film?

HANNAH PAPACEK HARPER - There was a seed which is the book, I really felt its energy. I had so many questions that were born from my own unknowing. I wanted to look at the data, the science, but in the way that data and science exist through curiosity and a creative approach. Because that is what science is: it's an artistic approach. Really, it is: how do you imagine what things could be? And then you look for proof. I wanted to take something that was very literary and very artistic, and find the data that could talk to it, develop it. I wanted that balance to exist between the artistic and the scientific. The people and all those connections just came together organically. For example, I wanted to contact a linguist in Edinburgh, because I wanted to talk about the extinction of language, and then that brought us to talk about language creation. We also found a linguist in Leeds who has a department dedicated to extinction and talks about losing languages for the people in the care home. I contacted Swansea University because they had had a program linked to the care homes in the region. We knew that in the region the book had been distributed, and we wanted to see if anyone had any data around that, and from that, many different things unfolded. Some of them came to us and say ‘we are from Swansea University, and we have worked with an artist who works with rivers’ and so we talked to the artist. Stephanie Januchowski-Hartley works in Welsh schools, and we collaborated with her a lot, getting the children to talk about their rapport to nature through her prism and through what she'd already told them. We found the people who had distributed the book firstly, in Wales, and they were a geology consultancy firm: with them, we created a workshop with that artist in the same school about geology. The kids got to talk and think about geology. We took them out. They drew rocks, studied their local geology for a day, and now it's part of their program for the next year. We're also planting seeds to see how much the film could have impact in the future. Fundamentally, it permitted us to have these great conversations with people, and open new subjects between different generations.

Loreta Gandolfi: This story is truly remarkable in how naturally it all came together, and how the film transcends being ‘just’ a film. Its creation is very inspiring, as it opens new avenues for practices in various areas.

I’d like to inquire about the selection of emails and the experiences shared by people discussing their perspectives and different ideas. Additionally, there are specific images that accompany these narratives. We have both the oral and visual storytelling: for example, when Robert Macfarlane speaks at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, images of a large tree at the college shape our visual experience. Throughout the film, what principles guided your choices regarding the images paired with the individuals and their particular narratives?

HANNAH PAPACEK HARPER - It was important to us that that nature be the main character. We were going to make a film that unfolds nature through the seasons and keeps it at the centre; we were trying to walk out of a completely anthropocentric perspective. But of course, because nature's voice can sometimes have trouble travelling to our ears, we needed to lend people's voices to that nature, so I really saw it as a dialogue running underneath this unfolding landscape, with this feeling of slowly running like a river through the seasons.

We were very lucky, because we had a director of photography Tess Barthes who was extremely resourceful and very creative in the way that she could propose different imagery from macro to micro. She did everything from the insects to the drone shots. We had a wealth of material that was infinite, we were filming over three years. The amount of material from different seasons was incredible. Hence, I was able to choose with great precision every single shot together with the editor. There was never a moment where I felt that something was missing or difficult. I wanted it to feel like a stream with whom the dialogue bubbles through and bubbles along with. That's why there is constantly a sense of movement and traversing: the film is a bit like a walk through nature.

I profoundly believe in making sure that people understand that connectivity; the baseline of this sort of storytelling is that we understand that there are no borders between us and the natural world, but also I return to what Marilyn Sheldrake, who is in the film, says about the fact that it's not so much that the things exist and they relate, it's the relating that permits those things to exist. I think we need to understand more concretely that we exist by relating to different non-human elements around us. I wanted to make it quite apparent that it is the oral stories, and these different points of view that make up our perception of nature. If we are born from nature – which is something, I think, that we often forget – we grow from nature like a tree and like anything else. Our voices are the essential ways of perception put into a collider and then shaken around, producing a bigger reality. That was why the storytelling aspect of having these voices run through it and to accompany the landscape(s) was essential to me. Tyson Yunkaporta, an indigenous academic and writer in Australia, says that the most durable data collector is oral transmission in language: the stories that we put together create a bigger story. So that's really the pillar of how everything was built on.

Loreta Gandolfi: The film came to fruition through the collaborative efforts of key contributors, including Gabriela Sawaya, who joined the documentary project in 2022 after completing her studies in Anthropology and Environmental Studies. As a production manager, she became part of your team of four women, alongside Tess Barthes and Julie Maréchale, traveling across the UK to explore different people's connections to their landscapes. From conducting research to handling logistics, reaching out to various organizations, and preparing for shoots, her role was to support your team and build relationships with participants, whether they appeared on camera or collaborated externally. She also accompanied you to pitch the project at several festivals, such as PFM London and Bio to B! in Bologna. She mentioned that the experience of making this film was enlightening, as you encountered many different individuals working together in diverse ways, all with the common goal of staying connected to nature. In a time of climate crisis, meeting so many driven people felt like a privilege and a source of hope for what collective action can achieve.

Personally, I am very interested in learning more about the team responsible for the film’s intricate sound design and the decisions made regarding it.

HANNAH PAPACEK HARPER - We worked very closely with the sound recorders and the sound designers: Julie Maréchale, Florian Vourlat, Cassandra Rutledge, Kistrie Howell, Lisa Higgins, Zoë Irvine, Heather Andrews and François Clos. We had several sound recorders, but the main one was French, and we worked on a lot of exploration. We talked about what we wanted to translate from each of these different landscapes, and then we found organic ways to access that. We used geophones so we could record the sound of different elements against different, not necessarily natural elements: how does wind react against glass, or how does wind react against metal, and if we can't hear it against rock, how can we? How can we make sound with wind hitting something else? We also used a hydrophone which we were using to test sound in different waters, water against different elements and then creating sound through that. We were even using non-organic elements that were present in the landscape, which was also bringing to our attention how much non-organic material is present everywhere: it can be an electrical porthole in the storm, a fence in the wind, or it can be a staircase metal leading into the sea. The gongs you hear throughout the film are a hydrophone against the metal staircase in the water that is being tapped. There's a lot of creation that was made from scratch. But then Zoe and Heather brought their creative touch to that. They reworked these sounds; they made them into more musical voices of nature. Heather brought a lot of her soundscape to the table as well, and the idea was to create a 5.1 sound where we immersed people inside the landscape and touched as many of their senses as possible, but also made it feel like we could hear geological time. We could hear the seasons switch – we forget to sit and listen to the landscape in its dialogue. This is what we want to translate.

Loreta Gandolfi: Are there any upcoming projects related to Lost for Words?

HANNAH PAPACEK HARPER – This film is going to have a very strong impact campaign. It will be part of the work that's going to follow, which is based on creating workshops and contacting different groups through the projection of the film, as well as collaborating with local artists and local scientists, for example. This is one of the parts of the project that for me feels like a next project. Another extension of that is also going to be creating a mini-series based on sound. This should be a way for us to give access to a younger public, because right now we needed to get a scope between adulthood and pre-adolescence,  so that people could still see it with a basic knowledge of science and a more complex one, and still find interest and still find that it had an impact; yet, obviously that closed the door to the younger generation with a 90 min project like this and with the complex terminology. We want to create an eight piece-20 minutes series. It is a search for a library of sounds for the next generations to come to be done in collaboration with musicians and children; eventually, there will be a response by musicians making a final concert with pieces that are created from the inspiration of these sounds.

Optimistically, Lost for Words is still going to have its impact before that happens.

Also, we're in parallel working on an immersive piece, Geopoetics, which is based on the Irish landscape. Once we started working on Lost For Words, I realized that, in spite of the fact that it was very immersive, I wanted to go further into inviting people into the landscape, that there were many tools at our disposal: now we can explore and actually bring people physically in and activate their sense of curiosity and also their sense of agency. I am under the impression that people feel like they've lost ways to connect and to take action, and that puts people in a place of immobility. Geopoetics gives us the opportunity to get into a “state” of landscape with a sense of agency and humility.

Loreta: Hannah, thank you so much for guiding me through an incredible journey of rediscovered perceptions and for your inspiring generosity in deeply sharing the richness of your approach in illustrating the limitless connections within the natural universe, of which we are just one element.

Wishing you the best of luck with the UK premiere of Lost for Words this Saturday, June 21st, at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival – what a magical day for your film, the Summer Solstice!