Visual Storytelling & Environmental Memory
BLACKEARTH
A Film Book
BLACK EARTH will be a film book.
An alternate history about a people whose land is stolen, whose history is unearthed, and whose resistance unfolds across entangled times, all told through the drifting, all-seeing eye of the earth itself.
In a world where earth and human fate are inextricably woven, three people - an uprooted woman who hears the land speak, a defiant river guide, and a young miner torn between identity and survival - enter a struggle against a rising wave of extraction that threatens to erase their culture, their stories, and the land itself.
BLACK EARTH takes place in a world where earth, water, sky, humans, animals, and spirits coexist in a web of reciprocity. Nothing is above or below; nothing exists alone. The land breathes, reacts, remembers. Into this fragile equilibrium intrudes a colonial power that declares the region terra nullius - empty, ownerless land - and seeks to excavate a precious raw material hidden in vast craters.
PROLOGUE
EXT. DESOLATE QUARRY - DAY
VERA (V.O.)
MY JOURNEY
TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
BEGINS WITH WRECKAGE…
THE CAMERA CIRCLES ABOVE TWO BODIES. THEY LIE IN A SINKHOLE, AS THOUGH UNEARTHED. AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND.
THE CAMERA DESCENDS. STONES DRIFT SLOWLY PAST THE LENS. REPEATING PATTERNS.
VERA (V.O.)
…AND ATTEMPTS
TO BECOME WHOLE AGAIN.
A DOG APPEARS, MOVING BETWEEN SCATTERED DEBRIS.
DISAPPEARING AND REAPPEARING AMONG RIDGES OF BLACK EARTH.
EXT. WASTELAND HOUSE - NIGHT
A HOWL RISES TORN FROM THE DARK.
RAIN HAMMERS AGAINST THE LENS.
THE DOG RUNS. STRAIGHT TOWARD A HOUSE.
IT REACHES THE FRONT DOOR. JUMPS AGAINST IT. WHINES. SCRATCHES.
WANTS TO BE INSIDE.
THE CAMERA DRIFTS PAST THE DOG, CLOSING IN ON THE DOOR.
WOOD. WORN. WET. IN SHARP FOCUS.
THEN-THE DOOR CRACKS OPEN. AN EYE APPEARS IN THE GAP.
RADOMIR LOOKS OUT. HE DRIVES THE DOG AWAY.
THE DOG RETREATS INTO THE STORM.
Project statement
Thanks to the MÓN mentorship with Rocco Rorandelli and workshops, I received valuable input that helped me turn initial ideas into the foundation of this work: the idea of a book.
As the coal industry is progressively phased out where I live, the landscape is left with ruins, remnants, and infrastructures of extraction, empty structures, broken machines, scarred terrains. While moving through and photographing these abandoned mining sites, I began to write and fictionalize what I saw, gradually developing a poetic film script. A fictional narrative started to take shape, set in this same region and centered on resistance.
This film book, as I call it, imagines an alternate present. In this speculative scenario, extraction becomes re-activated again, driven by escalating geopolitical tensions and the looming presence of conflict. Within this situation, new forms of resistance begin to emerge.
I'm taking photographs that belong to this speculative world. Photographs that do not simply illustrate the narrative, but instead expand it visually and conceptually.
The book combines photography with a film script structure, forming a hybrid work in which written scenes and visual material expand into a larger whole.
I'm very grateful for the support that Rocco Rorandelli and MÓN gave me.
Jozefien Van der Aelst
