Super Nature (PG)
Directed by Ed Sayers
⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑

BY unbelievable good luck, when my daughter was born I caught the birth itself on Super 8. I had only half a cassette, 90 seconds of film, and those 90 seconds are the most dramatic, tender and beautiful film I ever made. That’s the magic of Super 8: it feels fragile and precious, it has a painterly, amateur look to it, and it seems to capture miracles.

By making his entire film on Super 8, director/editor Ed Sayers presents us with a succession of moments that are one miracle after another. You find yourself watching this unique, disciplined and joyful film in a way that you don’t watch others: everything feels intimate, personal and uniquely lucky.

And the 40 filmmakers from 25 countries who contributed their silent sequences (S-8 doesn’t record sound), have found in Sayers the ideal curator of their gleeful encounters with dolphins, snails, salmon, rhinos, geese, hummingbirds, seals, and even the devastated environments of war-torn Ukraine.

The medium is so economical that each sequence is like a haiku, with only a few syllables available to describe the world. The “jump cut” is part of the aesthetic, always including the film-makers themselves, having fun. The net effect is, in Sayers’s words: “like a global home movie.”

When different authors collect haiku into a single longer poem it’s called a Renga and Super Nature has exactly the innocence, the light touch, the happy coincidence and the spiritual revelation of a great Renga. This is because a coherent and convincing narrative emerges serendipitously as the film progresses.

While many of the moments are ecstatic — and the sequence flying in a microlight with trainee geese (can you believe it?) is just that — the evidence of human abuse of the natural world accumulates, and anxiety seeps into the film. One shot documents the millions of tons of plastic floating in the ocean, and the generalised concern for Mother Nature finds its personal echo in the fact that Sayers’s own mother has died.

Nature is not just beauty, but also violence. The more you look, the more you see that its otherness is incomprehensible. It takes humility to recognise that our human nature is just a small part of this bigger, ungraspable process. But in that perception lie the seeds of recovery and recuperation.

Thematically speaking this film is not just as broad as Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, it is both humbler and more optimistic. And it has a brilliant soundtrack.

Truly a masterpiece, this is British independent filmmaking at its very best.

In cinemas September 4