Pushed Up the Mountain
Pushed Up the Mountain is a poetic and emotionally intimate film about #plants and the #people who care for them. Through the tale of the migrating rhododendron, now endangered in its native #China, the film reveals how high the stakes are for all living organisms in this time of unprecedented destruction of the natural world.
Beginning in my godfather’s garden in the Scottish Highlands, the film travels between conservationists in #Scotland and China who devote their lives to the rhododendron’s survival. Patiently observed footage of conservationists at work combines with centuries-old landscape paintings and my speculative voice to create a thought-provoking film about human efforts to protect nature for and from ourselves.
Director’s Statement
The inspiration for this film began in my godfather’s rhododendron garden in Scotland. I was there filming a short piece about a group of rhododendron enthusiasts gathered to work on a conservation project. What I learned was that most of these plants were originally from China, brought during the height of the British Empire, and that some were now endangered in their native habitat. In fact, some plants had even been reintroduced from the UK to augment threatened populations in China. The idea of this plant leaving and then returning home intrigued me. At first glance, it looked like an example of global cooperation to protect biodiversity against human caused threats. But what did it look like in reality given the legacy of colonialism at its core? Could this showy garden shrub reveal something about our entangled relationship with nature?
In 2015, I set out to answer some of those questions. Over the next four years, I and the film’s co-producer Mengqi Jiang filmed throughout China’s mountainous southwest and in its urban centers to the east. This combined with filming in Taiwan and more location shooting in Scotland. We interviewed nature conservationists, environmental historians, and philosophers, art historians, literary scholars, and horticulturalists. All people who cared deeply about nature but thought about it from different perspectives.
The result is Pushed Up the Mountain, a film that I hope will encourage people in countries around the world to think more deeply about the plants all around them and ultimately work to protect them. The coronavirus has powerfully demonstrated how interconnected we all are. The rhododendron gives us one more example of how we must come together across national divides to address the existential threats facing our species and our planet.
#PushedUpTheMountain #documentary #film #nature #environment #biodiversity #endangered-species #conservation #protection #preservation #GengYuying #DavidChamberlain #FangZhendong #SunWeibang #IanSinclair #LiuHuajie #HouShen #PanFujun #ZhangChao #MengqiJiang #JuliaHaslett #GOODDOCS #docu-films