It is a rock documentary but there is no pounding music, no terrible behaviour, no bombastic characters.
Instead, the 86-minute film tells the slow but compelling story of 12 months in the life of a 4,000-year-old stone that stands sentinel in the Cornish landscape.
A Year in a Field is a surprise inclusion in the prestigious Sheffield DocFest, where it is up for a prize, and will be in UK cinemas at the time of the autumn equinox this year.
While the film is simple, its maker, Christopher Morris, also hopes it will raise questions about the climate emergency and the impact our brief existence is having on the planet.
“The overarching theme that emerged is my own inability to grapple with the climate crisis,” said Morris. “What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to react to things that are happening in Brazil – a place I’ve never been to – or the Arctic?
“I’ve never strapped myself to a tree, never even been on a protest march. That’s not in my nature, that’s not me. But standing quietly in a field, a sort of one-man direct action seemed kind of appealing to me.”
The film, appropriately, emerged slowly. Morris had spent six years taking photos of the stone, which he published on an Instagram account, as a creative side project while he worked in management at Falmouth University’s school of film and television.
“At the start of lockdown I decided to begin filming the stone instead. I was struggling to get to grips with environmental problems but I didn’t have a plan or a budget, it was just me.”
Between the winter solstices of 2020 and 2021, Morris walked for a mile from his home in west Cornwall to the stone each day and filmed what he found. “It was usually on the walks there and back that themes started to emerge.” He filmed at sunrise, sunset, in storms. A crop of barley grows around the stone; a rainbow frames it.
Though the stone is isolated, the outside world crept in. The wrapping from an Ann Summers piece of clothing blew into the field, prompting Morris to think about environmentally unfriendly materials used in some underwear.
The G7 summit – and a US warship – arrived at nearby St Ives and Carbis Bay. “It made me think, perhaps they should carry out an environmental audit before they go to war,” he said.
Morris said his film was the “antithesis” of the “million-dollar dazzle” to be found in high-end nature documentaries. “They almost appear like science fiction,” he said.
His film dwells for three minutes on an insect on a leaf with no commentary. “Then at the end I say I have no idea what this insect is called.”
He films slugs and snails. “I’m good at filming things that move slowly. There are some great slug shots.” The song of skylarks can be heard. “But they eluded me. I couldn’t find them in the lens.” Having a “rubbish” tripod also helped, in a way. “I couldn’t pan or tilt. It made it all very simple.”
The film is the second feature from the Cornish production company Bosena, after Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, a folk horror that did well in art house cinemas this winter – and also features a standing stone.
Morris said he was “gobsmacked” when the film was picked up by Sheffield and a distributor. “It’s such as personal film, shot and edited on my own and made for no money. It’s the inner life of a field, it’s very slow, it’s very quiet and gentle.”
No human makes an appearance – the stone is the centrepoint. “I don’t believe in electric powers coming out of stones or anything like that,” said Morris. “But I do believe they were placed here for a purpose. They are very powerful. We should probably try to reimagine that purpose, to use them in a way that makes sense for us to use now.”
