My SDI

Join us for a Masterclass with director Julia Haslett in conversation with SDI Director, Noe Mendelle, about Pushed up the Mountain, a film about plants and the people who care for them.

By RSVPing to this event, you will receive a link to watch the film and the Zoom details to join us on the day.

If you want to watch the film in person, it will have its Scottish premiere on May 20 at the National Gallery in Edinburgh and will be followed by a tour around Scotland - check here for more details.  

Julia Haslett is a British-American filmmaker who makes expressionistic documentaries about contemporary and historical subjects. Her last film, An Encounter with Simone Weil, premiered at IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), won the Special Founders Prize at Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival, and was a New York magazine Critic's Pick. She is producer/director of the highly acclaimed Worlds Apart series about cross-cultural medicine, and producer of the companion documentary Hold Your Breath (PBS). Her short films have screened at, among others, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Black Maria, and Rooftop Films. Julia has received fellowships from the Macdowell, IFP Documentary Lab, and VCCA. She was a Filmmaker-in-Residence at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics and currently teaches documentary filmmaking at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Pushed up the Mountain is her second feature-length documentary.

For more info, visit https://juliahaslett.com/

Pushed up the Mountain, 76 mins, 2020

A poetic and personal film about plants and the people who care for them. Through the tale of the migrating rhododendron, now endangered in its native China, the film reveals how high the stakes are for all living organisms in this time of unprecedented destruction of the natural world. Beginning in the Scottish Highlands, the film travels between conservationists in Scotland and China who devote their lives to the rhododendron’s survival. Patiently observed footage of conservationists at work combines with centuries-old landscape paintings and the filmmaker’s speculative voice to create a thought-provoking film about human efforts to protect nature for and from ourselves.