Charging scenes of the present with dystopian speculation, Field Resistance teases the boundaries between documentary and science fiction to investigate overlooked environmental devastation in the flyover state of Iowa.

"The seed for this project was planted when I began researching the environmental situation I encountered in Iowa, where I lived from 2015 to 2018. Between the years 1830 and 1910 Iowa lost 97% of its prairie, its predominant ecosystem, to industrial agricultural production. Less than 0.1 percent of the original prairie remains, scattered in small pockets across the state. At present, nearly every acre of Iowan land has been privatized.

I began driving around Iowa in search of remaining pockets of prairie life, talking to ecologists, farmers and conservationists and collecting footage from many locations across the state – a university herbarium, karst sinkholes inhabited by primordial flora and fauna, and a telecommunication tower job site, to name a few. I also saw that in many ways, Iowans today are faced with conditions that evoke the apocalyptic: toxic blue-green algae blooms pollute Iowa’s lakes, fumes from hog-manure pits are so noxious that they can kill people who work near them, hundreds of native species face endangerment.

Though I still didn’t know what the project would be, I was in effect immersing myself in my surroundings and constructing an archive of sorts, united by my interests in communication, technology, and ecology. The more I shot, the more immersed I became in the Iowan landscape, the more it seemed to me that the footage was inherently ambiguous: it was both documentary, showing the very physical and mundane realities of the environment in Iowa; but it also evoked a sense of dread, of a grim, technological future. The footage didn’t just exist in its present sensory details, it also suggested a futuristic narrative.

What emerged is a document of the daily and the mundane in Iowa that is imbued with a speculative narrative – with science fiction. The film is implicitly divided into two parts – a first section that toys with the conventions of narrative and continuity, and an anti-narrative second section – but narrative and anti-narrative impinge on each other constantly throughout. With careful use of sound that ties the disparate footage together, I created an ambient narrative of plant expansion and humanity’s retreat. Scenes of the present are charged with dystopian speculation – the genres are blurred." - Emily Drummer