KALI WAAL

short experimental documentary by Jasper Coppes, 22 min., 1:2.35, 2K DCP, expected release 2024

A group of foreign researchers visits a site of ecological controversy and learns of the strange events that are happening to the lake and its human and non-human inhabitants. Can the natural reserve be healed with toxic mud as industries claim?

In the short film KALI WAAL, landscape design is both poison and remedy. A nature reserve in the Netherlands is the setting for an ecological controversy. Decades of industrial sand extraction created lakes so deep that no light can reach the bottom. The lakes have become lifeless pools of water.

Industries recently started to dump contaminated mud in these lakes, claiming that such undeepening will increase the biodiversity. A group of young researchers gradually discovers that this landscape is neither an innocent rewilding project, nor an ecological dead-end. As resilient forms of life take center stage a new ecology of plants, alga, animals, and machines increasingly takes over the film.

The project is coproduced with P–OST Nijmegen. Supported by De Korte Verbeelding (a collaboration of Mondriaan Fund and Netherlands Film Fund), Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Gelderland.

PRESENTATIONS
preview screenings in film program The River Flows Both Ways at Filmhuis Cavia, 15 Nov. 2024
Preview screening in Film Festival Sprouts, MACA, Amsterdam, 9-12 May 2024
Fragments From Shallow Lake, P—OST Nijmegen, 29 October – 11 December 2022
Our Living Soil, Zone2Source, 10 July – 18 September 2022

REVIEWS
MetropolisM, 2022
De Brug, 2022