In Virginia’s Tidewater region, over 40% of coastal wetlands have been lost to development and drainage since colonial settlement, with accelerating loss due to climate change and sea level rise. Even though wetlands are among the most biodiverse and productive ecosystems on earth, critical carbon sinks, and vital buffers against flooding and storms, their association with death—or the monstrous, the horrific, the negative—can be found throughout literature, film, and even language. Swamp Sowings is a feature-length ecosystems essay film centered on swamps and other wetlands as they exist in reality—as transitional zones between adjacent ecosystems—and as they exist in the imaginary—in film and literature. The film argues that cultural representations of wetlands have impacted our relationships with these landscapes, while also positioning these ecosystems as a subject worthy of complex cultural, ecological, and historical consideration.

Observational footage of wetland sites ranging from the Chickahominy River to the Great Dismal Swamp focuses on nonhuman inhabitants and the landscape—bearing witness to their daily negotiations with changing water levels, encroaching development, and climate impacts. The film contextualizes these observations through interviews with ecologists studying Tidewater wetlands, environmental justice advocates working on restoration projects, developers planning construction, and community members whose lives intertwine with these wetlands. 

For example, the film documents the dwindling marshlands along the Chickahominy River, while also detailing one community member’s relationship to an old Cypress tree along the river’s marshes; the camera follows a crew of volunteers for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation as they restore oyster reefs along coastal wetlands. Additionally, the film critically examines public policies like wetland and stream mitigation banking at sites like Virginia Beach’s Pleasure House Point; a project that was both publicly and legally contested by the surrounding community for its destruction of trees, despite the fact that it only returned the land to its original state as a wetland.  

Using found footage, voiceover excerpts, and deliberate re-stagings, the film transforms cultural artifacts through the specificity of Virginia’s ecosystems. For example, Charles Laughton’s dreamy river escape in Night of the Hunter is re-staged as an intimate study of land and animal communities along the Chickahominy’s marshes. Creature from the Black Lagoon reframes as a diver’s search for megalodon fossils at the bottom of Virginia’s waterways. The biologist’s fascination with Area X in Jeff VanDer Meer’s Annihilation informs my own fascination with the more-than-human in the Great Dismal Swamp. By analyzing and reimagining scenes from film and literature, Swamp Sowings reveals how wetlands function within horror and science fiction as sites of monstrous emergence, environmental anxiety, and dissolved boundaries between human and more-than-human worlds.

Lastly, the film examines both personal and communal historical records to trace shifting attitudes toward restoration alongside cycles of drainage and development. My paternal lineage’s relationship to these wetlands extends from the colonial era to the present, and the film will use personal memory and my family’s intergenerational archive to examine broader patterns of settler colonialism and environmental transformation while interrogating my family’s complicity in both.

Swamp Sowings explores how wetlands appear across American cultural imagination, grounding these representations in the actual wetlands of Virginia’s Chickahominy River, Great Dismal Swamp, and surrounding Tidewater wetland ecosystems. Here, the boundary between land and water refuses to hold. Species exist in constant metamorphosis and changing relationship to the environment. The landscape itself shape-shifts with the tides, or the push and pull of a river’s flow. The film revels in this space both in-between and ephemeral, enticing viewers to marvel at—and begin to care for—wetlands. In conclusion, Swamp Sowings positions wetland landscapes as active narrative agents, challenging anthropocentric perspectives while examining how landscapes are constructed through genre fiction, environmental politics, and cultural history.