River of Grass explores the past, present, and future of the Everglades
RIVER OF GRASS (Sasha Wortzel, 2025)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
October 24-30
www.riverofgrassfilm.com
www.dctvny.org
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the Everglades. I loved Gentle Ben, the television series starring Dennis Weaver, Clint Howard, and a seven-hundred-pound bear, set in and around the Everglades; the show opened with the three of them speeding through swampland on an airboat. When we visited my grandparents in Florida, a trip to the Everglades was often on the agenda, but I did not encounter the cuddly bear.
Thus, I felt a personal connection when watching Sasha Wortzel’s debut feature-length documentary; for the filmmaker, the experience was “profoundly personal.”
Wortzel wrote, directed, narrated, produced (with Danielle Varga), and edited (with Rebecca Adorno Dávila) River of Grass, a poetic work about the battle to preserve the Everglades, the region in Florida where she was born and raised. Eight years in the making, the “project grows out of my process grappling with what it means to be from a place that may cease to exist in my lifetime and with the complexities of ‘home’ in a settler colonial landscape,” she explains in her director statement.
The documentary was inspired by The Everglades: River of Grass, the 1947 book by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, published the same year President Harry S. Truman dedicated the Everglades as a national park. Douglas was a longtime resident of Coconut Grove in Miami — she died there in 1998 at the age of 108, having spent much of her life as an environmental activist. In addition to writing the book, she organized the Friends of the Everglades in 1969, and she is the namesake of the Parkland, Florida, high school where the 2018 Valentine’s Day shooting occurred.
“Man’s life on earth is limited by the conflict between his stupidity and his intelligence,” Stoneman Douglas says in the film, which includes rare archival audio and movie footage that Wortzel was surprised to find. “I think man can prolong his life on the earth for many thousands of years if he is intelligent, but I don’t know whether he’s intelligent enough. I just don’t know.”
All these years later, that intelligence is still up for debate as governments and corporations continue to display little or no respect for the natural environment as they mess with nature’s cycle. Wortzel introduces us to park ranger Leon Howell, who discusses the importance of the alligator to the ecosystem; Donna and Deanna Kalil, a mother and daughter team who spot and catch pythons, who negatively impact the area; two-spirit Miccosukee environmentalist and poet Houston R. Cypress, who talks about the tree islands, where his Native American ancestors would take refuge from soldiers hunting them down (Cypress is also a consulting producer on the film and a member of the Love the Everglades Movement); Kina Phillips, who advocates against the burning of the sugarcane crop, which releases toxic chemicals into the air and water; and the Stokes family, sixth-generation fishers whose livelihood is in jeopardy because of the draining and development of the Everglades.
Most significantly, we meet tireless activist and educator Betty Osceola, who, among many other things, leads prayer walks to protect the water. “I always talk to water, and I listen. Water has life. It has memory. If you slow down and listen and you pay attention, you can actually start hearing it and seeing what it’s trying to tell you,” Osceola, seen navigating in an airboat, says.
The documentary has a choppy, disjointed narrative as it winds between the past and the present. The participants and their affiliations are not identified, and Wortzel speaks only with those seeking to save the Everglades.
However, it is beautifully photographed by cinematographer J. Bennett, who captures gorgeous shots of the moon and sun over the Gulf of Mexico, stunning panoramas of the landscape, and striking vistas of the eight prayer walkers seen far in the distance, dedicated to what might be an impossible task but determined to keep up the fight.
But perhaps the most memorable image is that of Stoneman Douglas’s empty chair, sitting empty amid the destruction wrought by Hurricane Ian in 2022.
River of Grass opens October 24 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, with Wortzel on hand for six special events: postscreening Q&As with Varga, and Bennett, moderated by Tourmaline, on October 24 at 7:00; with Sierra Pettengill on October 25 at 7:00; with musician Angélica Negron and Keith Wilson on October 26 at 6:00 (Negron will also perform before the showing); with Osceola and Joseph Pierce on October 28 at 7:00; with Osceola and Arielle Angel on October 29 at 6:30; and with Lauren O’Neill Butler and Dominic Davis on October 30 at 7:00.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]