Slow cinema and its waves of resistance

Climate collapse is not a future apocalypse. It is already here. And yet the West treats climate crises like a new armageddon, with ticking time bombs and catastrophe montages, as sudden events that need immediate answers. We are drowning in capitalism’s endless tide and have created a demand for quick solutions, overlooking the depth of root causes. Against this vicious tide rises slow cinema. In a world that prioritises speed, what if slowness could be a radical act? The method embraces long takes, minimal dialogue and fragmented, non-linear storytelling. Holding a nuanced, patient view to quiet calamities, it teaches us to reflect, not react. It instructs us to feel and sit with the ripples of discomfort. The land bears witness to the lasting terror in its waters, trees and soil; film unearths what has been buried too long. The technique exposes a truth too slow for the news cycle and too loaded for a headline. To watch is to witness, to witness is to remember, to remember is to resist.  

To film a landscape is to listen to its ghosts. Jessica Beshir’s Faya Dayi (Ethiopia, 2021), Theo Panagopoulos’s The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (Scotland, 2024) and Alina Rizwan’s The Silence After The Storm (Pakistan, 2024) all measure the land through erosion, not time. In these works, justice is either felt, inherited, or reclaimed. They invite us to bear witness to the landscape, a living archive that stands ready to speak if we’re willing to hear it. 

Faya Dayi: The Slow Dance Of Long Takes

Faya Dayi is a poetic docudrama reflecting on the mystical grip of ‘khat’ (a lucrative cash crop). It exposes how colonial and capitalist legacies led to its cultivation causing harm to both the Ethiopian people and their land. The sumptuous black and white film opens with a half-formed landscape obscured by coils of evening fog. A young boy approaches the camera, dancing or stumbling on the wet earth and we hear a chorus of crickets. The mist wraps the frame with a tender hush before moving to the slow smoky tendrils whirling like Sufis amongst quranic recitations. Between ‘Alhamdulilah’ and ‘Wa Iyyaka Nastaeen’ meaning ‘from you alone we seek help’, the long shot spotlights a man with a tasbih, or prayer beads. He heralds the coming loop of suffering where time feels like it's bending back on itself. There is a prolonged focus on the khat plant which looms over the shadows. 

The fragmented storytelling reveals how the people, the land and khat all lose themselves in a daze. A housewife whispers ‘The scent of incense remains even when the smoke disappears/I am losing your scent’. The smoke moves like a languid arabesque as she describes her husband’s khat addiction. The director drifts and pauses on her body lying behind a thin veil embroidered with the land’s flowers. She cries ‘Merkhana (the high)  made you forget your kid at home’. Time and time again we see the imagery of delicate veils, where children are swathed in curtains. ‘Their flesh is here but their soul is gone’, whether it refers to a person who withers away from using khat, the plant itself or the land being drained of joy, remains an intentionally ambiguous metaphor, its words pirouetting around a heavy smog. The lingering takes do not label us as observers but we are fully immersed into an oppressive hallucination.The khat-reverie is symbolic of both the yearning for an imagined world and the immigrant’s desire to exile under harsh labour conditions. The plant is simultaneously an abyss of poverty and refuge for fantasy. Here, the narrative drifts beyond the confines of Western convention, where clarity fades and slow cinema allows for unresolved contradictions which leaves room for individual interpretation. We are sedated and taken on a mystical journey. Slowness is a portal, where past, present and future call to each other and the watcher becomes a time-traveller.

Resonance of the Forgotten in The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing

‘I trespass through his lens. I enter a portal into the past. A ghost from the future. A dystopic future’. Time travel is not only present in Faya Dayi but a familiar friend in the Zone of Interest-eque short film The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing. The reclamation of the original silent footage which chronicles the Scottish missionary film Wildflowers of Palestine, unveils occupied Palestinian land. Only 2 minutes and 13 seconds out of the archives are of Arab Palestinians. The director reanimates the archival wildflower footage, reviving histories forgotten by the rush of modernity. His intervention in the film acts as a bridge between past and present. The film’s silence is punctuated by careful fragments of text and a sound design of palpable hums. Beautifully sombre, the soundscape is conjured by the ney flute, a haunting and unpredictable melody, mirroring a surge of sound which simultaneously layers over and resurrects silence. Inspired by the uncontrollability of seeds, the music trickles at its own pace, transforming into an emblem of resistance. Western cinema defines the role of music to elicit a specific response, the abstract seed symphony does not tell us how we must feel, but asks that we engage with our emotional capacity. Resisting comprehension is its power, as a sound both underground and overgrown. In a dehumanised land ravaged by genocide, the seeds which ‘remain dormant’ and ‘sleep in the earth’ emerge physically and sonorously. In this choral search for justice, the ephemeral flowers and their acoustic landscape refuse to stay buried.  

Echoes Of The Mundane in The Silence After The Storm

The landscape is not framed through archival footage or long takes in Rizwan’s documentary; it reflects on the mundane. The Silence After The Storm follows the Sindhi people who rewrite their dreams after their locality floods. It opens with two young children speaking on a worn, barren land:

“Do you like rain”

“No”

“I don't like it either”

“I am scared of it”

The sparse dialogue encapsulates how climate devastation affects the livelihood of youth. Minimal words compose an intimate choreography of the Sindhi native tongue, woven into the fabric of the everyday. The unvarnished reality portrays the enduring nature of struggle. A child is questioned as to why he can’t attend school. The response? ‘It’s because of the floods’. There are no moments of drama, no flashing news headlines, only a quiet repetition present in dialogue and the earth’s relentless cycles. The floods ‘ruined everything, the fields, and everything’. Fast-paced cinema would gloss over these words, but here we are compelled to understand the gravity of repeated words. Western dramas coerce this horror into an extraordinary event but here there is a refusal: no one escapes their reality. It resists the entertainment industry’s tendency to distort these narratives into something ‘unreal’. The story goes beyond the child, who seeks solace for their land where ‘houses broke’ and ‘cattle died’. Foregrounding the child’s perspective strips climate chaos to its purest, most instinctive version, free from hyperbole. 

Are you listening?

What we call disaster is simply the earth remembering. The land does not forget the colonial legacies which linger in its soil and water. Slow cinema resists the rush and favours slow takes, unexpected sound design and minimal dialogue. Moving from quick fixes, it contemplates the long history of human exploitation, as opposed to just its symptoms. The mundane is meditative. The land is not silent. We have just forgotten to listen.