This poetic journey through language and landscape explores how reconnecting with nature’s vanishing vocabulary can help us reimagine our future with hope.

Hannah Papacek Harper’s wonderful engagement with the English language is a lyrical and visually rapturous journey around the UK. Inspired by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s beloved book The Lost Words, it is a response to the disappearance of nature-related words – like acorn, otter and bluebell – from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Weaving through changing seasons, remote landscapes, museum archives and science labs, the film uses the voices of children, elders, artists and scientists to offer up a shared yearning to reconnect with the natural world amid the climate crisis. With nature as its central character, it explores how language shapes our relationship with the environment and how losing words may mean losing a sense of wonder. A hopeful and heartfelt rally cry to reawaken our senses, it encourages us to forge deeper, more compassionate bonds with the world we live in.