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
