Year: 2025
Director: Hannah Papacek Harper
Writer: Hannah Papacek Harper
Producers: John Archer, Dorian Blanc, Rohan Berry Crickmar
Production Companies: Hopscotch Films, Rétroviseur Productions
Screen Scotland support: The film accessed funding through Screen Scotland’s Film Development and Production Fund
Synopsis
Lost For Words is an odyssey across the United Kingdom. It celebrates our relationship with nature through diverse voices while actively reshaping our anthropocentric point of view with a poetic and scientific approach.
Using Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris’s best-selling book The Lost Words as inspiration, Lost for Words begins with a journey around the UK, portraying landscapes, communities and their connections to nature. This project engages with the most prominent global issues of our time, starting with the evolution and disappearance of nature’s names from the language of young and future generations. Through this lens, the filmmakers tackle pressing concerns like climate change, habitat destruction, population displacement species extinction. Their approach is empathetic and non- catastrophizing, avoiding alarmist narratives to foster collective action.
By immersing viewers in the character and essence of the UK’s natural landscapes, Lost For Words showcases diverse British communities rediscovering and renewing their natural surroundings. Rather than showcasing global landscapes, they focus in on one local environment to draw people into an intimacy with nature while raising questions that are increasingly pressing for everyone on this planet.
Examining humanity’s historical relationship with nature, Lost For Words explores themes of land ownership, colonization, and linguistic imperialism. Central to the storytelling is the choice of underrepresented voices as protagonists: children, Alzheimer’s patients, female researchers, social workers, artists from different backgrounds. This approach addresses nature’s accessibility, among marginalized socio-economic groups, while also inspiring viewers across all demographics to identify with participants on screen.
Lost For Words is an invitation to forge a new relationship with nature and spark dialogue on how to reconnect with it. It provokes questions in both viewer and protagonist. Together we wonder: What is our future? How can we shape it? How do we consider the needs of the non-human world?
More information
Image credits: Stills courtesy of Hopscotch Films / Rétroviseur Productions
Premiere: Lost For Words will have its World Premiere at CPH:DOX on Thursday 20 March 2025.