Around the world in 80 minutes: Ed Sayers’ odyssey

At a time when the world feels riven with divisions: between super-rich and stateless; cisgenders and transgenders; climate change deniers and those who've lost their lives to it, there’s never been a more important time for a film that reminds us of ‘oneness’, of our unity with the natural world. 

We are nature, we need nature, we crave it, even while we are destroying it. 

A lifelong devotee of Super 8, Sayers founded the Straight 8 filmmaking competition in 1999. The spark for Super Nature came years later in 2020, when 80-year-old French entrant Roger Batteault submitted a mesmerising film of flamingos in flight, prompting Sayers to pick up his own Super 8 camera and head to the Norfolk coast to film seals. He had a hunch that more could be done with nature celebrated in the medium. 

The response was clear – this is something that had to be made.

Rebecca Wolfe who’d produced some Straight 8 films was smitten with the idea and the pair teamed up “the first two people we saw were the BFI Doc Society and I spoke to Asif Kapadia [Oscar-winning producer/director; Amy, Senna] and the response was clear – this is something that had to be made. That put some fuel in our tank straightaway,”

The BFI put in some development money that enabled them to make a teaser that attracted more filmmakers, but also crucially, the funding for a global film project bringing together more than 40 contributors across 25 countries and five continents. Many were from the Straight 8 community, alongside conservationists, biologists and activists. Each was given two Super 8 cameras and invited to turn their lens on the natural world around them.

I wonder where the birds go when the fighting happens and what they make of it.

“I told the filmmakers, ‘have someone come with you with the other camera and get footage of you filming, so that when we hear your voiceover we know who we’re hearing from’."

By looking at humans looking at nature, we are analysing how the observers observe and relating to them. This enables an extra layer of connection within the film, the BTS is kind of baked in. Sayers agrees the thesis of the film didn’t necessarily start out as an examination of connectedness, “it wasn’t at the onset but that is what it became.”

Designed as an environmental production, only the cameras travelled to local filmmakers, who were then trained remotely in the art of Super 8. The result was 27 hours of footage – that’s seven miles of film.

Above: Dice Nachman sets out to film skittish quails in Joshua Tree Park, California.

Condensed into 82 minutes, the film is a masterpiece of editing that has wowed audiences and critics alike. Hailed as “ravishing and unpredictable” by The New Scientist and “a triumphant collage of hope” by The Guardian, it takes us on a journey around the world that is also a journey into our own humanity – our sensitivities and also our folly. 

Watching the film one wonders why it is so much more immersive and poetic than many modern wildlife documentaries where one is privy to nature’s secrets via high-def 4K crystal sharp renderings that magnify the tiny hairs on a bee’s tiny legs. 

We thought the narrative and the rhythm of the edit should grow so that eventually it felt like a chorus

Sayers expands on the active perception that Super 8 format invites. Much like an impressionist painting, the grainy obscurity asks the mind to get involved in reading the picture, this input from the viewer personalises it, bringing the heart along with the mind. 

But it’s not just the medium that is inherently moving. The selection includes some heart-stopping stories. As he quietly climbs into a camouflaged floating hide, a man with Parkinson’s attributes his obsession with filming UK pond life to the slowing of his disease.  

Above: A barn owl in flight.

In Grenada, a woman dives around an eerie underwater sculpture park featuring subaquatic human forms, one of which is a cast of herself at nine years old. As they peacefully sleep with the fishes, the sculptures become reefs for new life to grow. The experience inspired her career in marine conservation.

A deaf woman explains how her initial devastation at losing her hearing has turned to gratitude for the peaceful silence that enables her to immerse herself wholly in the visual splendour of filming insects up close and personal. 

Sound, and at times not sound, is a crucial part of this film’s emotional language. Super 8 is a silent medium, so filmmakers were asked to record voice notes and audio clips, which Sayers augments with his own commentary. Weaving together the disparate films is a swooning original score from Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres, while David McAuley’s delicate sound design brings the creatures and land to life — from the clatter of ibex locking horns, to the zingy crunch of Arctic snow underfoot.

Above: Press photographer Laurel Chor who filmed nature under fire in Ukraine.

In a film about reconnecting with the natural world, silence becomes not a limitation, but another way of listening. Another sequence, shot in Ukraine by photojournalist Laurel Chor, finds its power in what is not heard. Accompanying scenes of soldiers loading rocket launchers, of the devastation wrought, the shattered homes and broken trees, they decided to not use “the incredibly shocking and loud” sound of missiles firing. 

They’d tried it in the edit but found it was more potent to “lean into the sound of the camera whirring. It emphasised that we were marking a moment. Registering it as a thing that happened, which of course the whole film is doing but I think that subtly underlined what was happening there.”

I never wanted it to be a collection of short films.

The killer line comes from the voice clip Chor sent in “I wonder where the birds go when the fighting happens and what they make of it”. This suggests how nature views us, how other species could be bemused at the folly of our wars, the devastation of our shared habitats.

From white rhinos and rainbow-hued sea dragons, to tiny snails and whales, the film offers an intimate, dreamlike portrait of an extraordinary variety of creatures. Sayers admits it was a “really hard job pulling together 40 different stories and making sure that it felt like one whole film. I never wanted it to be a collection of short films.” He needed the clips to “speak to each other. We thought the narrative and the rhythm of the edit should grow so that eventually it felt like a chorus.”

Above: A key moment in Super Nature is the decidedly un-super, unnatural Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Sayers’ narration is lyrical and measured, it’s an important driver in the film that brings a cohesion, creating the “chorus” that Sayers aimed for. Being the director, one of the producers, the editor and also one of the subjects he needed with the narrative. “We brought in story consultant Ed Watts, which was a brilliant move. I used to joke that two Ed’s are better than one and it was.” 

Together they dug into the various recordings and voicenotes sent in. Contributors had been given free reign with Sayers instructing: “anytime you feel like it record how you’re feeling, before shooting, after, what your thoughts are about how it went.”

I think people make the mistake of thinking hope is a sort of an emotional plaster you stick on when you’re feeling a bit unhopeful.

He ended up with a mass of reflections to sort. “We had a million Post-it notes on the wall and organised them into different sequences. It was one of the toughest challenges of the whole project.”

What adds to the film’s emotional weight is the focus on the personal. “I didn’t want to learn the details about how this animal is different from that one and what that means or what the science is.” Instead he wanted to hear people’s “most present, personal thoughts.”

Above: The Wadi Rum Desert, Jordan.

What he values is the specificity that leads to universality. “When someone is very specific about what their feelings are that can resonate even if it’s something that’s unfamiliar to you. I think that’s what’s giving the film the feeling of connectedness.”

The two Eds settled on three tones to give the film structure and emotional journey. “Obviously one is ‘wonder’; looking at a butterfly in slow motion or flying geese. Then of course the second is ‘reality’. You can’t make a film about nature today without looking at some of the fires we’re facing. So, we had to have fire. We’ve got the floods in Pakistan. We’ve got war. We’ve got plastics in the ocean.”

The third tone is ‘hope’. “I think people make the mistake of thinking hope is a sort of an emotional plaster you stick on when you’re feeling a bit unhopeful. But real hope only comes from action and those actions can be smaller than we think they have to be.”

Sayers reveals that Ed Watts was “a bit like a shrink. He helped me to unpack the enormity of the journey the making of the film had taken me on.”

Watts would ask him about a scene and he’d explore it. For example, what became a pivotal moment in the film is when he went to film seals again, this time in Cornwall. Something that led to his My Octopus Teacher moment.

Above: Sayers prepares to dive with seals in Cornwall

It was September and Sayers’ mother had died in August. He’d gone down to Cornwall to meet a man who film seals underwater. “I’d gone down on my own with a little tent and all these underwater cameras. I’d set up and then I was walking along a coastal path at night to get some food. There was an enormous harvest moon. It was glowing bright orange and impossibly large and was reflected on the water.”

I was thinking about Sarah, my wife, not being there. It was kind of the first thing I’d done on my own since Mum had died, so I had time to reflect a bit more.” The next day, Sayers dived with a friendly seal who seemed determined to make contact. During the interaction he felt a strong presence of his mother.

We couldn’t finalise the story until I’d finalised processing the stuff that had happened over the five years while I was making it.

Sadly, he’d not had a chance to say goodbye to his mother but after that encounter he almost felt as if that now didn’t matter so much. The scene is significant moment in the film and answers an earlier scene featuring Sayers’ mother who appears in a family holiday video with a beaming mini Ed. He’s explaining how his father’s Super 8 home movies inspired him and how he grew to love the medium’s effect of creating “painted memories.”

Sayers explains how his emotional journey and the film’s progress are linked. “The two things worked hand in hand. We couldn’t finalise the story until I’d finalised processing the stuff that had happened over the five years while I was making it. It’s a nice reminder for me, that little moment. Whether people get that that is my mum and connect it later to the seal scene is by-the-by, but I know it’s all stitched in there.”

Above: Flooding in Pakistan.

This reflection on human mortality only adds to the impact of a film with so much “stitched in there”. At 82 minutes, Super Nature is relatively short and easy to watch, yet it manages to encompass so much — life, death and our place on the planet.

I know we’re not going to go and live in mud huts because Ed’s made a film called Super Nature.

“We’ve all got mums and dads and just like all the other organisms, we’re all just here for a short time,” Sayers muses. “We’re just passing through, and Indigenous wisdom teaches us to do so with as little damage as possible. But perhaps we’ve lost some of that simplicity. It feels a bit trite, me talking about this, but I feel we’ve lost our way.”

“I know we’re not going to go and live in mud huts because Ed’s made a film called Super Nature and I know we’re not going to reverse things but I hope that it just oxygenates the conversations around being a bit kinder to our environment, ourselves and other organisms."

Another crucial, and sobering moment in the film it the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Hundreds of miles from land as sunshine sparkles on the blue ocean a trawler gathers a massive haul of plastics. It’s a chilling reminder of what we are leaving behind as we “pass through”.