Hurricanes are part of life in South Florida, a season in the calendar as ubiquitous as Summer and Fall; there’s even a rhyme for them, where each month corresponds to a particular state of readiness for impending destruction. June, too soon. July, stand by. August, look out you must. September, remember. October, it’s over. In Sasha Wortzel’s poetic new feature documentary, River of Grass, Indigenous environmental activist Betty Osceola describes hurricanes as nature’s way of clearing house; they’re only destructive, then, depending on your point of view. The history of the Everglades, that titular River of Grass, could be characterized as a war between man and nature, in which hurricanes are just one recurring battle. But to Wortzel, an Everglades native, there is more going on in her homeland than just the violence of nature, industry, and history.
It only took 10 days after the last major hurricane in the Everglades before Wortzel dreamt of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. Wortzel curates the famous environmental activist’s image, preserved in filmed interviews toward the end of her life; reads her words, published in dozens of books, the most famous being River of Grass from 1947; and invokes her legacy, woven into the fabric of Floridian culture, for dual purposes. The first, to illuminate her work for an audience, including Wortzel herself, who might not know much about her; the second, to recontextualize it. The result is a document of sense as much as history, in which the viewer explores the breadth of environmental resilience across the Everglades today, as well as Wortzel’s own memories of a childhood spent amongst its splendor.
Osceola, a prominent activist in her native Everglades, is an important thread in the film. In the context of Douglas’ own words in her famous book, Osceola’s prayer walks weave what Wortzel calls “an alternative infrastructure to climate resilience.” These walks are an important form of embodied activism, a kind of prayerful presence, and ask participants to acknowledge the land and strengthen their own personal bond with it. While these walks are distinct from protest, they still ruffle a few feathers, such as when Osceola and her group of walkers are temporarily blocked by property developers early in the film. Such obstacles — overcome only after the Army Corps of Engineers confirm the group’s permission to walk on the land — and Wortzel’s film overall, reveal the gulf between not only the oppressor and the oppressed, but between who is traditionally seen as the oppressed, and which forms of resistance are seen as legitimate.
Wortzel’s elegiac narration goes to great lengths to describe the vivid details of her Evergladesian upbringing. Tree bark that peels like paper, clouds of mosquitos that avoid you so long as you keep moving, a roaring chorus of frogs. Wortzel’s imagery and writing are as expressive as her presence within privileged communities is illuminating yet unintrusive. But these elements also sit inelegantly next to each other. Spearheaded by Osceola, the stories of activists are informative, but never stir emotion the way Wortzel’s narration does. And most of the players here — including a mother-daughter duo of Burmese Python hunters, a family of crab fishers, a Black community fighting the industrial burning of sugar cane, an employee of the Everglades National Park, and workers at a wildlife veterinary — are given but a cursory few minutes of attention. At 79 minutes, excluding credits, there’s no denying River of Grass is undeniably swift. But quite unlike a hurricane, one feels these stories disappear the moment they touch down.
DIRECTOR: Sasha Wortzel; CAST: Betty Osceola; DISTRIBUTOR: Fourth Act Film; IN THEATERS: October 17; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 23 min.
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