Centred on sphagnum moss, Translocations highlights the mutual aid and reciprocal exchange that exists between species in the restoration of a lowland peatbog. Featuring the voice of botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, and a tactile soundtrack score, the film documents the human and more-than-human life, energies and actions that are transforming an intensively farmed and damaged terrestrial environment back into a flourishing wetland habitat. The film is structured around volunteers moving ('translocating') gathered balls of sphagnum moss from replete to deplete areas of the bog, enabling a keystone species in peat formation and carbon sequestration to thrive and rejuvenate a vital part of the biosphere.

Exploring the luminous and vivid characteristics of this rewilded, transitional terrain, the film depicts the abundance of re-introduced sphagnum moss and the dynamic mosaic of co-dependent species that are now thriving both above and below the surface of the bog, from flowering cotton grasses and carnivorous sundews to dragonflies and silk-moths.

A film by Nick Jordan
Original soundtrack score by Otis Jordan - available from Set Foot Press
Voice: Robin Wall Kimmerer, from podcast On Being with Krista Tippett
Underwater bog recordings by Tracy Hill, with Phil Phelps
Production Assistant: Adele Jordan

With thanks to:
All staff and volunteers at Lancashire Wildlife Trust; Robin Wall Kimmerer; Andrea Prevost and Krista Tippett at the On Being Project

Made with the support of The University of Manchester

Film review: 'TRANSLOCATIONS' – A Swamp, Moss, and the Spell of a Lost Humanity