Professor’s feature-length film debuts at Cornell Cinema

"Possible Landscapes," a new feature-length documentary film exploring the lived experience of landscapes and environments in the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, will have its debut screening on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 7 p.m. at Cornell Cinema. A reception will follow. The event is free and the public is invited.

The film is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between Natalie Melas, professor of comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, who works on Caribbean literature and thought, and Tao DuFour, former assistant professor in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, and currently Fellow in Architecture at Trinity College Cambridge. The film was directed by professional documentary filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam.

The film seeks to "query the formation of environmental and climate imaginaries, with a view to getting at larger historical questions-of migration, plantation societies, extractivism, race, and the legacies of colonialism-that inform everyday practices in ways that are difficult to identify and to articulate, because they are concretely lived," write the researchers.

"Possible Landscapes" joins seven people in seven different regions of the islands in the course of their daily lives. The two-year research project that resulted in the film, "Possible Landscapes: Documenting Environmental Experience in Trinidad and Tobago," was funded by a two-year team research grant from Cornell's Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge and the Mellon Foundation's Just Futures Initiative.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.