Re-Connecting Us With Nature, Through the Magic of Movies

By Michael Gold

Susan Todd and Andrew Young are trying to help re-connect children and adults with nature, through movies. One of their recent films tells kids you don’t even have to go very far to find it – just look around in your backyard.

“There’s a whole generation raised up without a connection to nature,” Todd said. “People in our generation had their own alone time, their own discovery time. Now we have all these kids who have grown up on their screens.”

Documentary producers Todd and Young, a married couple who run Archipelago Films, made a film about the animals they saw in the space around their then-Croton-on-Hudson home, from wood ducks to frogs, bees and racoons.

Shot in 3-D IMAX, “Backyard Wilderness,” which won the award for Best Short Film from the Giant Screen Cinema Association in 2018, contains stunning, slow-motion action of wood duck chicks launching themselves out of their tree hollow nest to the soft leaf litter below in a mad effort to chase their mother to the local pond, a frog on a window zapping a moth with its tongue and a ladybug falling off a leaf stem, then grabbing hold of it in microseconds. The 44-minute film is the only IMAX movie ever shot in Westchester.

They set up small cameras in nests and garbage cans, even underwater, to capture animals doing the most ordinary things – drinking water, walking around, swimming, hunting for food, living their lives, yet which strike the viewer as extraordinary moments of wonder.

“Showing the film, you could see the kids’ excitement,” Young said.

Their current film, “Wings Over Water,” narrated by actor Michael Keaton, focuses on three types of birds that use the waterways and wetlands of America’s Great Plains for food and breeding grounds – the sandhill crane, the yellow warbler and the mallard duck.

The movie shows how migratory birds tie the entire continent into one giant ecosystem.

“We were in 15 different states,” Young said.

Now Pleasantville residents, Todd and Young, who grew up in Chappaqua, are developing a new documentary on science and the spirituality of our connection to nature, to be titled “Hardwired.”

“Our connection to nature is being lost,” Young explained. “There is a growing science that shows our bodies are hardwired to be in nature.”

“Time in nature can enhance cognition, reduce stress, reduce our chances of getting dementia, improve cardiac health and reduce depression,” Todd said.

“There is an idea of awe (of nature) that is very healing to our bodies,” Young pointed out. “How can we deny ourselves access to nature when science demonstrates that we need nature?”

The couple started a nonprofit in 2015, Arise Media, dedicated to raising funds to make films not typically produced by mainstream commercial cinema companies. For instance, they made a movie about a group of native peoples trying to save their rainforest home in Panama, called “The Spirit of Kuna Yala.” Arise sponsors other filmmakers who want to make nature-based movies as well.

They filmed animal behavior in Madagascar for biologist David Attenborough’s series, “The Trials of Life.” Continuing their work, they made another film, called “Madagascar: A World Apart,” to help environmental organizations conserve nature on the island, off the coast of Africa, which won two Emmy Awards.

They chose to focus on the environment because it was “something we could portray where we could make a difference,” Young said.

“We want people to rethink their relationship to nature,” he explained.

Todd and Young have traveled all over the world to record wildlife. In the Congo, they filmed lowland gorillas. In Glacier Bay, Alaska, Young, trying to film salmon under water in a creek, saw a very large, hungry brown bear approach.

“I had to flatten my body, as flat as a pancake, on the ground, while he proceeded to fish,” Young said.

Young walked into a cave of five million bats in Texas during breeding season. There were so many bats that they couldn’t help but fly into him and bounce off his chest (Folks, don’t try this on your own without proper supervision and rabies inoculations.)

Turning their attention to a story closer to home, they’re currently focused on our yards. They’re developing a film about a movement underway among people converting their lawns into habitats for species.

Tentatively titled, “My National Park,” the film will focus on how to convert your lawn to native plants, which they’re planning to do on their own property.

“We all need to become aware of our environment,” Young explained. “We depend on clean water and clean air, and pollinators for our crops. These are things that we need in order for us to have a future. We have so much to learn, but we can get there.”

To help Arise Media make films to help the environment, visit http://www.arisemedia.org/donate.

Pleasantville-based writer Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union, The Virginian-Pilot, The Palm Beach Post and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary journal.