This land holds stories. Powerful seeds that, when cared for, bloom into a flourishing and resilient ecosystem. Seeds of Change Film Festival celebrates the work of artists, researchers, and communities within the PT2050 network and beyond who are committed to reimagining how we live, adapt, and thrive in a rapidly changing climate through the medium of film.
Inspired by Planet Texas 2050’s mission to advance interdisciplinary research on resilience and co-design adaptive strategies with communities across Texas, this festival centers storytelling as essential infrastructure for survival in an ever changing climate. Seeds of Change Film Festival gives a platform to artists and filmmakers who are in intentional relationship with the natural world, who utilize their medium to create awareness, celebrate the beauty of the natural world, and offer strategies of building a more resilient and abundant future.
Shot, produced, and edited during the 2021-2022 artist-in-residency for UT Austin's Planet Texas 2050 initiative, "Climate isn't Small Talk" is a short video poem exploring a poet's personal relationship between Texas and climate catastrophe, from the Panhandle to South Texas.
Directed & Produced by: Mónica Teresa Ortiz
Edited by: Génesis Mancheren Abaj
"La Luna" is a short documentary by filmmaker Jackson Ingraham chronicling the creation of Diego Miró-Rivera's groundbreaking land art work at La Cuna Center in Art, Texas. Through the careful orchestration of a prescribed burn, the film reveals fire not as destruction, but as a vital ecological tool. The artwork's luminous controlled lines render the burn legible in a single, striking image, reframing public perception and reducing fear. In collaboration with the Central Basin Prescribed Burn Association and Texas Parks and Wildlife, La Luna honors the knowledge, labor, and stewardship required to sustain Texas prairies, illuminating a practice both ancient and urgently contemporary in an era of ecological uncertainty.
Directed by: Jackson Ingraham
Artwork by: Diego Miró-Rivera
Produced by: La Cuna Center and Tree Monster, in collaboration with Central Basin Prescribed Burn Association and Texas Parks and Wildlife
"Hot Spell" was shot in the west Texas desert as a meditation on heat, sun exposure, and reflection. The work engages with the perceptual intensity of an arid landscape. The audio weaves together sounds recorded on site, foley audio by Katy Cone, and found audio, building a layered sonic environment that echoes the work's preoccupations with interior and exterior states.
Directed and Produced by: Liz Rodda
Foley audio recordings by: Katy Cone
"Dust Doesn’t Think Of Us" is a collaboration between Flora Weil and Maria Fernandez Pello. Inspired by the story of a local cemetery that Weil encountered during her fieldwork in the Gobi Desert, the film mixes footage by both artists, exploring different forms of human relationship with nonlife – from geomancy to mineral collections, burial sites, and archeological artifacts. Through a performative and speculative conversation with desert dusts, the project challenges notions about the nature and location of thought in an attempt to disrupt the bio-ontological belief in the superiority of (thinking) life over (thoughtless) nonlife, ultimately drawing attention to the constructedness and fluidity of such categories.
Created by: Maria Fernandez Pello & Flora Weil
You are walking down a mountain trail that moves off into the sunset, a sunset that never stops. The sunset colors the mountains in purples, and pinks, and oranges and stays for so long that the rocks confuse themselves for these shades of purples, and pinks, and oranges. You hum. You dissolve.
Written, filmed, edited, and scored by: Hannah Spector in collaboration with Valentine, Texas.
"Remembering Kearneytown" is a collaboratively produced short film exploring the legacies of environmental racism in Warren County, North Carolina, known as the "birthplace of environmental justice." Rev. Kearney, assistant pastor at Coley Springs Baptist Church, located two miles from the landfill site, calls for his community to reclaim their legacy of environmental justice and develop a healthy relationship to the environment.
Photography, storytelling and vision by: Bill Kearney
Videography, scripting & editing by: Pavithra Vasudevan
Created by: Kate Freer
Alongside collaborators in the lower Rio Grande Valley, research scientists at The University of Texas at Austin are working to create integrated models and tools to address a range of compounding and cascading impacts due to climate change–from intensified flooding to increased risk of soil, water, and insect-borne disease transmission. The AI-enabled Model Integration Flagship harnesses the predictive capacity of high-powered computing and the wealth of knowledge within local communities and historical archives to provide actionable information to communities and to preserve and protect the people, cultures, and landscapes of this region.
Directed by: Marcelo de Stefano
Cinematography by: Tori Gene McCarthy
Sound Design and Score by: Daniel Restrepo
Directed by: Marie Lorenz
"aqueous" cultivates attention to sources and locations of water around us, including its seasonal, geologic, and geographic abundance and scarcity. Created with Denton, Texas waterways in November 2020, and featuring butoh dance, the film of the ongoing site-adaptive performance shows water as a significant shaper of our world and lives.
Choreography and Performance by: Rosemary Candelario
Video and Editing by: Tara Baker
Music by: Sarah Ruth
Sound Engineering by: Stephan Lucas
Costumes by: Rachel Hudson
Boat: Brian O'Connor
Created by: Ty Defoe
"Launch Site" explores the surroundings of SpaceX’s latest rocket launch pad on Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. In the midst of a Wildlife Protection Area and breeding grounds for almost 500 different bird species, SpaceX is testing and launching its newest spacecraft, the “Starship”. The documentary short examines the bits and pieces of everyday life and rapid changes around Boca Chica Beach. The launch towers loom over the dunes and the flatness of the land, pointing towards an interplanetary life for a chosen few. In this landscape, Elon Musk has become an icon for a life among the stars and the colonization of outer space. Yet for whom and at what cost here on Earth? Increasingly, Musk’s vision looks like escapism for the ruling class and an abandonment of all earthly challenges. “Launch Site” overlays technological progress, environmental awareness, and corporate hype as a panoramic engagement with the capitalocene.
Created by: Florian Grundmueller, Randolph Lewis, and Craig Campbell
Produced by: The Gigacities Collective
Music by: Randolph Lewis
In "Neches" we join an older woman who experiences a quiet telepathy with the Neches River. The river offers us the woman’s memories, as she recalls being a young girl warmly introduced to the spirit of the place by her mother. As the film conflates time, we see a forest once lush now gone– can a landscape provide the resolution our guide craves about the past?
Cast: Spike Gillespie, Adriana Bucheru, and Kira Matica
Written & Directed by: Katy McCarthy
Produced by: Insufficient Funds & 24 Cobras
Director of Photography: Richard Carpenter
Additional Camera: Katy McCarthy
Sound by: Katy Fairlee
Additional Sound by: Timo Nelson
Script Supervisor: Wyatt Frantz
Production Assistant: Isaac Duerkson
Production Assistant: Dominic Sanchez
Editor: Katy McCarthy
Sound Supervisor: Joseph Kennemer
Color by: Sergio Muñoz
Music by: Little Mazarn
Casting by: Breakdown Services
