About the Film

This environmental art documentary film follows artist Shane Finan during his time working on the Kielder Wildwood project, Northumberland Wildlife Trust‘s long-term rewilding initiative in Kielder Forest. Rather than explaining the ecology of the project, the film stays close to Shane’s own thinking as he plants trees and works out what the project actually means to him.

Green Tubes of Hope

Shane spends a lot of the film talking about the plastic guards that protect young saplings while they establish. He has his own name for them.

“These tubes, I call them my green tubes of hope.”

It’s a small phrase, but it carries the whole idea of the project inside it. A tube tree growing inside its guard doesn’t look like anything yet. What Shane is really filming, in a sense, is patience itself, the long and mostly invisible work of a woodland that won’t properly exist for decades.

A Remote and Patient Landscape

Kielder Forest is one of the most remote parts of England, all empty hillside, forestry plantation and open sky close to the Scottish Borders. Filming there means long drives, changeable weather and very few other people around, which suited the mood of what Shane was talking about. The Wildwood site itself looks, at this stage, like very little: rows of young tubes across bare upland ground. The film leans into that rather than trying to make the site look more finished than it is.

Making an Environmental Art Documentary Film

Films like this, spending real time with an artist while they work out what a project actually means to them, are some of the work I enjoy most. Rather than turning up with a fixed set of questions, I try to give someone enough space that their actual thinking starts to surface on camera, not a polished explanation of the work, but the thought as it happens. With Shane, that meant following him around the planting site and letting the conversation go wherever his attention went that day.

In practice that usually means keeping things simple. On a shoot like this, out on an exposed hillside with changeable weather and no shelter nearby, I work alone with a single camera and whatever audio setup the situation actually calls for. There is no crew to coordinate and nothing to set up that gets in the way of someone just getting on with their work, which matters when the whole point is to catch something unguarded.

I also try not to over-plan an interview before I arrive. I’ll usually have a sense of what a film needs to cover, but the actual questions tend to grow out of watching someone work rather than a fixed list prepared in advance. With Shane, most of the best material came from him talking while his hands were still busy among the tree guards, not from a formal sit-down conversation afterwards.

Part of a Longer Story

This environmental art documentary film is one of several I have made about Kielder Wildwood over the years, alongside a longer film following the wider rewilding project itself. Each one looks at a different part of the same slow story: volunteers planting trees, ecologists monitoring species, and here, an artist trying to put words to what the project feels like from the inside.

About Northumberland Wildlife Trust and Shane Finan

Northumberland Wildlife Trust leads conservation and rewilding work across the county, including the long-term Kielderhead Wildwood restoration project. Shane Finan is an artist working across sculpture, sound and moving image, often responding to landscape, ecology and environmental change. You can find out more about his work at shanefinan.org.