Artist's film, 2025, 10 minutes
Writer and Director: Annie Goliath
Performer: Sophie Page Hall Voiceover artist: Beth Organ
Singer: Annie Goliath Composer: Black Astronaut
Set in 2054, the film begins as the marine ecologist Sophia investigates a mysterious die-off of cuttlefish along the coasts of England and Ireland. Unable to resolve the crisis alone, she turns to her friend Muireann, a contemporary shaman whose practice weaves together ecology, animist spirituality, and imagination. Informed by the director’s quarter Irish heritage and research into Celtic and Neo-Shamanic traditions, Muireann honours ancestral wisdom and scientific inquiry while responding to the urgency of the ecological crisis. As Muireann enters an altered state of consciousness to commune with the cuttlefish — an animal of distributed intelligence and remarkable camouflage — a rich empathic exchange emerges. Filmed on the ancient Rock n’ Nore beach in Hastings, the work uses utopian science fiction as a framework to imagine new ways of thinking and feeling with the planet. Inspired by Vandana Shiva, Peter Godfrey-Smith, and Andreas Weber’s 'Poetic Ecology', the film questions mechanistic and extractive worldviews, proposing instead a relational ethics grounded in empathy, reciprocity, and care.
Through the creative methodologies of entangled filmmaking, improvisation, and poetry, I sought to create a process of co-creation. The sound, movement, and layered edit grew intuitively, echoing the rhythms of the cuttlefish. The film invites an imaginative, sensory, emotional engagement — a meditation on ecological relations, grief, and the possibility of renewal. Merging speculative science fiction, eco-poetic narration, movement, and sound, the film becomes an interspecies reflection on the possibility of connection, wonder and resilience.