I am currently working on my first film (working title: Trespass).
Poetically blending elements of autobiography and documentary, Trespass imagines the potential for solidarity between human and wild beings in a story about experiencing and surviving bodily/domestic trauma. The idea emerged during field trips for my Environmental Impact of Filmmaking project in 2024, and I'm now developing the script and gathering more material as I travel around the UK.
Trespass rationale
There used to be hedgehogs in my garden. Lots of them. As a child, I remember my parents waking me in the night and leading me downstairs, the lights turned off in the kitchen so that we did not disturb their meal. Gently opening the back door, careful with the torch, I’d be delighted by their presence; two, sometimes three, pinecone creatures emerging from the bracken beyond the fence to rootle through our bins. They often left rubbish strewn across the patio like careless festivalgoers. But even my mum didn’t mind.
I haven’t seen a hedgehog—not alive, anyway—in twenty years.
Newts, too, used to fascinate me. I would spend hours beside the pond at the edge of the park behind my grandparents’ house for a glimpse of one that never came. There were always dragonflies to watch in the meantime, though, cavorting in metallic finery between the reeds. Then my nan would tell me stories about animals she had known when she was young, and we would listen together for the bird that she described. It was always a wood pigeon, though.
To this day, I have never heard a cuckoo.
This is not for want of trying, or for lack of time spent outdoors in all seasons.
This is because I was born in 1986, and, over the course of my lifetime, nature in Britain has faced unending attacks. Wild lives—mammals, mosses, trees, fungi, insects, arachnids and so on that live beyond domestic and agricultural control—are routinely subjected to human violence ranging from state-authorised land grabs to industrial-scale polluting. Water suppliers fill our rivers with sewage; councils rent out conservation areas for blockbuster-film location shoots. Now, the government is ripping up nature recovery strategies to build more data centres and ‘grow’ airport runways. No one I know sees hedgehogs anymore.
Since 1970, species abundance has declined in the UK by 19% (State of Nature, 2023). Globally, the UK ranks in the bottom 10% globally for the preservation of biodiversity; it is the most nature-depleted member of the G7 group (Biodiversity Intactness Index, 2021). And while humans are the common cause of threats to wild lives, many of those without power or ownership of private land are affected, too. We have lost 49,000 miles of public rights of way to poor mapping and illegal obstructions, and a meagre 8% of countryside is accessible to us in England and Wales (Right to Roam, 2025).
So: what should we do in Britain to reverse what ecologists are calling the ‘sixth mass extinction’ of life on Earth? How might humans repair the damage they—we—have caused? And can film help humans empathise and find routes to solidarity with wild lives that may seem unfamiliar and distant owing to human loss of connection with 'othered' natures?
By deploying what I'm calling 'speculative' anthropomorphism, and slipping between fluid and undefined animal, plant, and human subjectivities, Trespass draws on my own experiences of gender-based violence, classism, and ableism to explore the impacts of violence on the body, mental health, and the spaces that we safely/unsafely inhabit as land-less beings.
I haven’t seen a hedgehog—not alive, anyway—in twenty years.
Newts, too, used to fascinate me. I would spend hours beside the pond at the edge of the park behind my grandparents’ house for a glimpse of one that never came. There were always dragonflies to watch in the meantime, though, cavorting in metallic finery between the reeds. Then my nan would tell me stories about animals she had known when she was young, and we would listen together for the bird that she described. It was always a wood pigeon, though.
To this day, I have never heard a cuckoo.
This is not for want of trying, or for lack of time spent outdoors in all seasons.
This is because I was born in 1986, and, over the course of my lifetime, nature in Britain has faced unending attacks. Wild lives—mammals, mosses, trees, fungi, insects, arachnids and so on that live beyond domestic and agricultural control—are routinely subjected to human violence ranging from state-authorised land grabs to industrial-scale polluting. Water suppliers fill our rivers with sewage; councils rent out conservation areas for blockbuster-film location shoots. Now, the government is ripping up nature recovery strategies to build more data centres and ‘grow’ airport runways. No one I know sees hedgehogs anymore.
Since 1970, species abundance has declined in the UK by 19% (State of Nature, 2023). Globally, the UK ranks in the bottom 10% globally for the preservation of biodiversity; it is the most nature-depleted member of the G7 group (Biodiversity Intactness Index, 2021). And while humans are the common cause of threats to wild lives, many of those without power or ownership of private land are affected, too. We have lost 49,000 miles of public rights of way to poor mapping and illegal obstructions, and a meagre 8% of countryside is accessible to us in England and Wales (Right to Roam, 2025).
So: what should we do in Britain to reverse what ecologists are calling the ‘sixth mass extinction’ of life on Earth? How might humans repair the damage they—we—have caused? And can film help humans empathise and find routes to solidarity with wild lives that may seem unfamiliar and distant owing to human loss of connection with 'othered' natures?
By deploying what I'm calling 'speculative' anthropomorphism, and slipping between fluid and undefined animal, plant, and human subjectivities, Trespass draws on my own experiences of gender-based violence, classism, and ableism to explore the impacts of violence on the body, mental health, and the spaces that we safely/unsafely inhabit as land-less beings.