21/06/2023 - Christopher Morris makes a stunningly beautiful, yet enormously sobering, feature-length documentary debut

“I’ve never glued my hand to a road or strapped myself to a tree, and I’ve never been on a climate protest march, but once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters are happening more than once in my lifetime, and I’ve got to do something...”

For British director Christopher Morris, doing something means making his feature-length documentary debut, A Year in a Field. But while climate-change documentaries often trade in an understandable urgency, with portentous interviews from experts warning us all of the doom that we face, Morris takes a far different approach. Sitting in a field for a year, he reflects on human existence in the face of disaster. Yet whilst his cinematic effort – which had its world premiere as part of the International First Feature Competition at the recently concluded edition of Sheffield DocFest – is a quiet and still piece of work, it is no less crusading or insistent than its more melodramatic counterparts.

Beginning on the 2020 winter solstice, Morris films a field near his house in Cornwall, close to England’s South coast. The expansive landscape of barley crops is overseen by the Longstone, a standing stone thought to be more than four millennia old. Whilst the reasons for the erection of the stone will forever remain a secret held by history, it becomes a symbol of both humanity’s ingenuity and its hubris.

As he returns to the field throughout the year, Morris provides a voice-over reminding us of what is happening in the rest of the world. Natural disasters are occurring on a scale that has never been experienced before. Temperatures are hitting record highs. But the world still remains slow to react.

His calm voice-over is mirrored by the images he shoots. There is often a sense of the idyllic, a pastoral beauty in this impassive yet beautiful landscape. Sometimes accompanied by Cornish folk music (the music in the film is wonderful and evocative, and constitutes a crucial part of the doc’s power), there’s almost a sense of it being a natural history programme as the imagery washes over us. But this idyll is used as a juxtaposition, a reminder of not only what we will miss, but also of what we as a species have become disconnected from. Indeed, the folk music is not just there for its melodious delight; the songs remind us of times when humankind had a much more harmonious relationship with nature and the planet it lives on.

While no actual human beings make a physical appearance, their presence is still keenly felt. At one point, we see a shipping label from a package of lingerie originating from China, as Morris ruminates on the journey that brought it there. The vapour trail of a plane reminds us of the CO₂ that is being pumped into the air. Humankind does not share the landscape; it violates it, the very remnants of its existence seemingly at odds with nature and our continued survival.

This is a quietly devastating piece of work, with Morris himself describing it as “a direct action of stillness” that is as beautiful as it is despairing.

Produced by Cornwall-based Bosena Films, the company behind Mark Jenkin’s recent movie Enys Men [+see also:
film review
interview: Mark Jenkin
film profile], the film will surely be a fixture at festivals with an ecological bent, although general doc fests will also be entranced. While the big screen is definitely the place to see it (and a home theatrical release is due in September via distributor Anti/Worlds Releasing), VoD and TV success also looks likely.