4/22

5pm

The Sanctuary for Independent Media, 3361 6th Ave., Troy, NY

Be the Media! Workshop: Community Collaboration and Reciprocity - Before the screening there will be a Workshop https://www.mediasanctuary.org/event/be-the-media-sasha-wortzel/

“River of Grass” Film Screening & Q&A - https://www.mediasanctuary.org/event/river-of-grass/description - Join us for a film screening of River of Grass, a documentary film which is described as “An ode to the Florida Everglades, told through the prescient writings of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and those who today call the region home.” This film screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Sasha Wortzel who, ahead of the screening, will also offer a Be The Media! workshop called Community Collaboration and Reciprocity at 5pm.

RIVER OF GRASS is a present-day reimagining of environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s celebrated book, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” (1947), which forever changed the public’s understanding of the area from worthless swamps to an essential source of freshwater, enabling the ecosystem to endure, just barely, today. In the wake of a hurricane, Douglas visits filmmaker Sasha Wortzel in a dream, catalyzing a prismatic journey across the Everglades with Miccosukee educator and activist Betty Osceola. Interweaving Douglas’s writing, personal narration, present-day verité, and archival footage, RIVER OF GRASS reveals how this country’s origin story haunts and inextricably shapes contemporary American life, while asking how we might weather coming storms better together.

Sasha Wortzel is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist using video, installation, sculpture, and sound to explore how past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Raised in Southwest Florida and based in New York, Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored from these regions’ histories. RIVER OF GRASS (2025) is her first feature documentary. The film won the Pare Lorentz Award from IDA, Hot Docs Joan VanDuzer Special Jury Prize – International Feature Documentary, and Mead Audience Award, among others. The film received institutional support from Sundance, Ford Foundation, Sandbox Films, Knight Foundation, Doc Society, Field of Vision, and Chicken & Egg Pictures.