It's Just Movies

— by BEV QUESTAD —

Like a poem to The Everglades, “River of Grass” begins with Sasha Wortzel walking the beach at night with a flashlight, hoping to see turtle tracks. If she does, maybe she will even be able to see a mother lay her eggs. She softly explains, “Every spring they navigate the magnetic fields of the earth to the shores where they were born.”

Wortzel, the filmmaker for “River of Grass,” is in the Everglades. She reads lines from “The Everglades: River of Grass” (1947) by Marjory Stoneman Douglas: “There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth. Remote. Never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them.”

A woman’s suffrage advocate, conservationist, and journalist, Douglas (April 7, 1890 – May 14, 1998) was influential in changing public opinion from thinking the Everglades was a worthless, treacherous swamp into regarding it as a respected, revered National Park by 1947.

But as Wortzel points out in her film, this designation did not free the park of threats from population expansion, polluters, and developers. At age 79, in 1969, Douglas took on the role of leading conservation efforts to save the Everglades. Her brave, no-nonsense work earned her a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the resentment of agriculture and business development interests in Florida.

Also featured in “River of Grass” is Betty Osceola, who leads a prayer walk into the Everglades. Osceola is a tribal elder and judge of the Miccosukee tribe and a part of the Everglades Advisory Committee. The film features her throughout the film with increasingly more people in her prayer walks.

Throughout the film, the words of Douglas and Osceola partner with the astounding photography directed by J. Bennett, who has written: “I am guided by light and the ethereal into the essence of any subject.” We witness a montage of Bennett’s art: the Everglades in the dark, underwater, and in piercing light, punctuated with the sounds of nature.

“River of Grass” weaves its parts like a symphony. The weather leads with its percussion and the Everglades respond with flight and emotion. The soft education of the protectors, and the hot air of the trouble-makers. The storms, cyclones and turbulence.

The most startling thing I learned is the benefit of big storms and cyclones. If the Everglades are left alone, without drainage canals and other engineering projects, these great storms have the potential to provide the periodic washing, clearing, and restabilizing that the area needs.

“River of Grass” is the kind of artistically done conservationist film you wish you had seen in school. It explains the interconnectedness of people, nature, and health with poetic content and innovative photography.

Credits
Director, Producer and Editor: Sasha Wortzel
Producer: Danielle Varga
Director of Photography: J. Bennett
Editor: Rebecca Adorno-Dávila and Sasha Wortzel
Composer: Angélica Negrón
Archival and Co-Producer: Monica Berra
Co-Producer: Alexandra Codina
Consulting Producer: Rev. Houston R. Cypress (Consulting Producer)
Featuring: Betty Osceola, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Houston R. Cypress, Leon Howell, Kina Phillips, Steve Messam, Donna Kalil, Deanna Kalil, Heather Barron, Malka Spektor, Timothy Navin, Bart Stokes, Haylee Stokes, Colton Stokes

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