Name: Geographies of Solitude
Item: Geographies of Solitude
Rating: 4.5
Author: Andrew Parker

The most relaxing documentary of the year, Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies of Solitude shows how one person’s passion and obsession in an isolated location can help us better understand the world around us. Winner of this year’s Best Canadian Documentary Feature prize at Hot Docs, Geographies of Solitude is a visually and sonically arresting work of art and science about two people – an ecologist and a filmmaker – who find beauty, sadness, and music in everything around them, even things most casual observers would dismiss as being insignificant.

For the better part of fifty years now, researcher Zoe Lucas has lived and worked by herself on Sable Island, a 20 mile long, 1 mile wide piece of land off the coast of Nova Scotia. Initially, Lucas – who founded the Sable Island Institute – travelled there in 1971 with a group of researchers to document the island’s wild horse population, but she fell immediately in love with everything else the uninhabited and untouched landscapes had to offer. Thus began a never-ending process of discovery for Lucas, who meticulously documents everything she finds and observes, from the island’s hundreds of unique, endemic species to the depressing amount of litter that accumulates on the sandy shores.

Geographies of Solitude is a film that’s both meditative and intelligent. It’s meditative in the respect that Mills places the viewer so fully into island life and the solitude of it all that the film washes over the eyes with ease. This lived-in quality gently and confidently illuminates Lucas’ research, shining a soft, but pronounced light onto the island’s cycles of life, death (which is confronted head on here and can be somewhat disturbing to behold) and environmental rebirth. Mills brings a playfulness and clarity of vision to Geographies of Solitude, building a film that has an artful air about it while boots are still planted firmly on the ground. The clarity of Mills’ vision has a consistent rhythm and pace that’s befitting of the film’s subject and the land she has adopted as her home.

Mills and Lucas prove to be perfect collaborators who find art and meaning in every facet of nature. While Lucas goes about her daunting task of being the only person constantly paying attention to the comings and goings on a small island, Mills is using the opportunity to play with the form and function of the cinematic medium. There are some experimental passages of Geographies of Solitude where Mills’ chosen 16mm film stock (which is exquisitely detailed throughout, full of eye popping colour even at night) is aged and manipulated by the natural landscapes of Sable Island and later processed by hand. There’s also a distinct through-line of musicality to be found here, with choruses of seals, ants, beetles, waves, and plant life all creating their own microcosmic symphonies. Geographies of Solitude looks and sounds better than any other documentary this year.

Mills’ personal, artistic reflection on being alone with nature and noticing the small details links up perfectly with Lucas’ conservation efforts. Lucas logs everything she sees down to the most microscopic degree, from the horse population to landscape shifts. But the most eye opening and universally relevant aspect of Lucas’ research might be her documenting of all the plastic waste that washes up on the shores of the island every day. Every bit of detritus is logged, bagged, studied, and tagged by Lucas, taking up a good chunk of her day. If it seems extreme to take note of every deflated balloon to wash ashore (the number of which will astound and frighten viewers to their core), it’s because solving problems starts only after a tremendous amount of information has been gathered. Lucas leaves no stone unturned, and her continued enthusiasm for something most would find a thankless task is inspiring and infectious.

Documentaries usually only have to work on a single, focused level for them to be deemed a success, but Geographies of Solitude manages to be a fully satisfying work of cinema. On a technical level, Mills’ work is a marvel. As a profile of an interesting person performing a vital service with little fanfare, it’s an eye opening call to action. And it also manages to be one of the most artful meditations on human life made all year. In short, Geographies of Solitude is an unassuming gem of a movie that’s the total package.

Geographies of Solitude opens at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto, Vancity in Vancouver, and Cinéma du Musée in Montreal on Friday, December 16, 2022. It opens at Metro Cinema in Edmonton on December 17 and Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon on December 19.