Elemental

Lead is a quiet disaster. It gathers in the blood, muddles the brain, chokes breath mid-air. Across North America, bald eagles are routinely poisoned by the collateral damage of lead ammunition still used by hunters. Eagles ingest it accidentally, feeding on gut piles when fish are scarce.

Early in 2025, I filmed the unfolding of this annual crisis at MARS Wildlife Rescue in Merville, British Columbia. Lead is simultaneously the toxin that grounds the eagles and the shield that protects the women rehabilitating them, lining their gowns during X-rays. On its own, lead does not necessarily equate to death; only through human design does it wound or protect.

To care for wild animals is to touch without taming, to bandage and release knowing you may never find out what happens next. Here, rescue can look like restraint, and healing can resemble harm. The work is precise and unrelenting. It calls for dedication. If lead bullets aren’t regulated, the triage of poisoned eagles becomes an endless cycle, shouldered by care workers and shadowed by uncertainty.

Burning coal emits humanity’s greatest contribution to the planet since industrialization: atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In the northern grasslands of China, people mine for coal day and night. They contaminate groundwater and lay waste to fragile vegetation. The nomadic peoples who depend on these sources lose their pastures to desertification. In the nearby Gobi Desert area, worsening climate conditions and prolonged droughts force villagers to relocate from this already hostile region. To slow the creep of the desert, migrant laborers plant trees in this sea of sand. It’s an all too human attempt to atone for destruction with investment. Their toil and will to reclaim life from the desert brings forth a hint of green, but against the vast yellow dunes, it is but a drop in an ocean of dryness.

In this short film, I wanted to capture the absurdity of destruction and remedy on a massive scale.

In the late 1800s Britain adopted the Greenwich Mean Time standard. Since then, time has become even more prescribed, more granularly defined, more controlled and, perhaps because we measure it so precisely, more precious. In 1967 the second was officially defined as 9,192,631,770 pulses of radiation from a cesium-133 atom, which now sets the standard for universal time around the globe.

Framed by conversations about time with my 6-year-old son, this short film explores the tension between objective measurement and subjective experience, highlighting some of time’s contours, fractures and unexpected synchronicities; from the time that drops bombs to the time that tracks productivity, the time that allows a train to arrive precisely on schedule to the time of watching my son grow as his ideas of time unfold with a logic that challenges my adult understanding of what time even is.

When I was a child in Argentina, my dad would come home with his clothes completely stained with blood. Every day I looked at the strange red shapes on his white suit and imagined that he brought that blood from fighting monsters or adversaries.

Thirty years later I asked my father to show me his former workplace: the slaughterhouse. I wanted to discover the place that was once forbidden to me, to meet the men who work there today and seem similar to how I imagined my father when I was younger.

At the end of each workday, we invited the workers to sit down with us and talk in a portable tent we built away from the noise of the slaughterhouse. Word spread among them about our documentary, and I overheard them encouraging one another to participate: “It’s very simple. You enter the tent and a guy asks you: How are you doing? And then you tell him about your life.” I couldn’t have explained it better than that.

Working with knives was discussed here and there, but I was surprised how children and parents — or the absence of them — were brought up in all my conversations with the workers. For a moment, the executioner’s objective was left outside. Together inside the tent, we were investigating how we bond among men, as men. Is it blood lineage, a war wound or the opportunity for brotherhood?