In THE UNFIXING, Nicole, a Brooklyn born mother of two, offers a visual diary of destruction, grief, pain, love, and transformation. Using family archives, verité, and animation to meticulously weave a pathway of metaphorical scenes, she explores how all these ripple outward, echoing across generations and landscapes.
A surfing accident triggers a sickness in Nicole, she cannot work and can barely parent her kids. No doctor can identify the cause. As she begins to unravel the mystery of what is wrong with her, she discovers larger and larger questions connecting her journey with her parents, her children, and Mother Earth.
Her youngest child, Blue, expresses their deep anxiety about the climate crisis. They tell her that the Earth their generation is inheriting “is like getting a broken present and we’re expected to fix it.” They have lost part of their mother to illness and they are losing parts of the planet - polluted oceans, burnt forests, and dying species - to the global environmental crisis.
Then her older child Pilar gets sick with Lyme disease - which is on the rise because of climate change. She has episodes of paralysis and is unable to go to school. Nicole’s survival strategy of learning from her own losses now becomes impossible.
Losing her will to live, Nicole has a vision of her father who died of AIDS when it too was little understood. Seeing him at peace gives her the courage to face the heartbreak, both personal and global, around her. By exploring the visual, scientific, and spiritual threads interconnecting these losses she begins to move her own grief for the years lost to illness out of the shadows.
Nicole and Pilar are in the Rocky Mountains seeking treatment while forest fires fill the air with smoke. The pandemic is in full throttle. Nicole is terrified and losing faith - is the story a tragedy? She is reminded about her lessons in neuroplasticity - that fear blocks learning and leads to the very pathway she doesn’t want. She must release her fear and find a way forward.
Through a series of encounters with wise women, nature, and her own dreams, Nicole discovers that the whole world is not broken, there is beauty and regeneration and change. She hikes alone up a mountain to a stunning alpine lake. Wild Gray Jays approach her and eat out of her hand, filling her with pure joy, renewal, and wonder. Finding comfort that we - all of us - are just a very small part of this planet that created us, she concludes that we can cast a new story in our bodies and in the landscape. One that transforms the transition and loss and sees possibility and hope as we forge a future together.
Alan Berliner, Emmy Award winner & Guggenheim Fellow
Nicole was the Producer, Director, Writer, and Camera for the HBO documentary feature film “Before You Go” (Emmy Award/Golden Spire Award) She was Producer and Camera for the POV feature film “90 MILES” (Best Documentary at New York Latino International Film Festival and Festival de Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano in Cuba).
She has created many short videos for distribution online or for community screenings including the following: “Healing Rebel” about neuroplasticity; “Sing the Water Song,” (in collaboration with Native American grandmothers); shorts on farming in Central America; 70 films about food for parents; music videos to motivate Latinos to vote; short video series for HuffPost and The Weather Channel.
Nicole was granted a Food and Community Fellowship (W.K. Kellogg Foundation) and a Donella Meadows Sustainability Leader Fellowship. As Executive Director of MediaRights, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to media for social change, she produced an award-winning film festival and the first online outreach toolkit for filmmakers. She has served on many juries/panels including the Emmy awards.
We often talk about being connected to nature, being more than our bodies. Over the course of my life I’ve felt this connection when swimming in the ocean or looking at a sunset. But then something happened that made it more physical, terrifying, changing what I thought I knew. The shift happened after I became disabled with ME/CFS in 2014 and I started to sense an echo of our destruction of nature in my own body. It came through dreams and visions and changed my aesthetic as a creator, from a more traditional documentarian to one who incorporates nonlinear, metaphysical, and mythical scenarios to express sensations and impressions that are not easily communicated with language or facts.
“THE UNFIXING” is an exploration of these connections as I witness my own chronic illness, my child’s illness, and environmental devastation. The film is a layered cinematic collage of verité, video art, personal essay, animation, and my 60 year-old family film archive. Private, internal landscapes of collapse, regeneration, and my illness-induced lucid dreams inspired staged moments: burying my body under beach stones; weaving memorial ribbons in a burnt forest; entangling my half-naked body in roots; dancing underwater with my child.
Through illness, loss, and filmmaking, I am discovering ways to connect with our world in trouble as a witness and as a dreamer. Telling stories about the world through my personal experiences is a visceral process. In 1971, when I was three years-old I was picking up little dead fish scattered along the beach and throwing them back into the water. I was trying to save them. My mother, a feminist film teacher, handed me a super-8 camera to film the fish. Twenty years later I filmed “Before You Go” (Emmy/HBO, 1995) about my father who died of AIDS at a time when people with AIDS were seen as dangerous and homophobia was even more rampant than it is now. More recently, an Algonquin Grandmother who wanted to help me heal, invited me to collaborate on a film project, “Sing The Water Song” (2018, YouTube/Vimeo/Facebook/Instagram). This viral short with 2 million views celebrates the connection between women and water as they sing a sacred water song. In the film, water is a character that becomes alive, sentient, and deserving of our respect and care.
This project is a family affair created in the rooms of our lives and the landscapes we visit. My husband Bray Poor is my long-time creative collaborator. He is an award-winning sound designer and composer for theater and film. My children Pilar and Blue and my mother Jeanne, an accomplished author and artist, are not just characters, but production designers, prop managers, and production assistants.
People today are living in a time of unfathomable loss to our natural world as we are reeling from chronic illness and lost loved ones from the pandemic. Over the five years of making “THE UNFIXING” film we had an opportunity to create interactive experiences in community gardens in Manhattan. “THE UNFIXING Video and Sound Installation” is a part of our community outreach and includes a memorial for losses in the natural world. It became our role to hold space for people as they came to rest and grieve. The video screen suspended over a candle-lit coy pond reflected on the water’s surface. We gave each guest a flower to place near the candles. We only grieve what we love. The response from participants was profound - there is a deep need for spaces like this.
We are living in a time of transition, a liminal space. So many young people are anxious and in despair, and why wouldn't they be? They are growing up with looming pandemics and climate disasters. As my child Blue said at the age of 12, “I don't really have hope that the world's going to turn around.” But if we don’t believe things can get better, who will?
Stories change our chemistry, the wiring of our brains, and our health. But our stories about nature aren't just changing us, they are changing the landscape. Social and political change starts with how we change the narrative. We can co-create change in alignment with nature. What emerges from that might surprise us. I hope that this film offers another way to face the sickness in our bodies and the earth, a path of allowing, listening, receiving - all things I thought were passive. Now I know they are active, courageous, and acts of rebellion.
-Nicole Betancourt