‘Super Nature’ review: Impactful Super 8 natural world doc exec-produced by Asif Kapadia

Dir: Ed Sayers. UK. 2025. 82mins

We now have turn out to be used to seeing the pure world on display in all its high-definition glory, the most recent filmmaking expertise enabling crisp, close-up element at macro and micro stage. With Tremendous Nature, nonetheless, debut function filmmaker Ed Sayers takes a special strategy, stitching collectively a patchwork of brief vignettes from around the globe all shot on classic Tremendous 8 cameras. The result’s surprisingly immersive, the format and topic working in concord to create a world overview of the pure world, and our place inside it.

The Tremendous 8 format itself lends a tactile, nostalgic really feel 

Bowing in London’s documentary competitors, Tremendous Nature is govt produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Amy, Senna) – whose curiosity in environmental points fuelled his personal 2024 sci-fi documentary hybrid 2073. That ought to definitely assist draw consideration to this movie, which ought to discover an appreciative viewers possible through a streamer or broadcaster. It is also utilised as an efficient software for schooling and advocacy.

Sayers is a long-time lover of the Tremendous 8 format and established the Tremendous 8 filmmaking competitors Straight 8 in 1999. When one of many entrants, Frenchman Roger Batteault, submitted a brief movie of flamingos in flight, this impressed Sayers to exit together with his personal Tremendous 8 digicam and movie seals on the Norfolk Coast. From that second, in early 2020, advanced the thought for Tremendous Nature, during which over 40 worldwide contributors – together with many from the Straight 8 group along with conservationists, biologists and activists – have been equipped with two Tremendous 8 cameras every and requested to movie the pure world round them.

These two-to-three minutes clips come from 25 international locations and have a veritable menagerie of animals: there are desert quail within the USA; whales in Argentina; puffins in Whales; reindeer in Norway; monkeys in India; kangaroos in Australia. There are additionally an unlimited vary of landscapes, from the mountains of Valle d’Aosta, Italy to the rivers of Scotland’s Isle of Lewis and the Storm Alex (2020) ravaged shoreline of Le Var, France.

Working as editor, Sayers has performed a terrific job of sewing collectively this seemingly disparate footage right into a cohesive complete. There is no such thing as a apparent throughline as such – though Sayers does insert his personal voiceover all through as he reacts to the movies and presents his personal footage – however hyperlinks and connections quickly start to emerge. City centres like Delhi and Bangkok play host to a stunning number of wildlife. Underwater reefs in Tasmania and Granada – the place an underwater statue park has been erected to regenerate the coral – are teeming with aquatic life.

With every contributor additionally offering snippets of narration, shared passions and issues additionally come to the fore. There’s an amazing love of the pure world, in fact, and a fear about environmental change. In Kenya, park ranger Zacharia discusses the duty of taking care of the final two remaining northern white rhinos, each feminine, and of efforts to deliver the species again from the brink. In the course of the Pacific Ocean, 2000km from land, Valentina movies from aboard a ship which drags enormous netfuls of human waste – footwear, electronics, plastic bottles – from the ocean. “It’s terrifying to consider the mark we’re making on our planet,” she says.”

The movie is, nonetheless, shot by means of with a substantial amount of hope. In Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Fanta works tirelessly at a turtle sanctuary; within the USA’s Mojave Desert, Dani devotes her life to defending snakes. The Tremendous 8 format itself lends a tactile, nostalgic really feel that proves heat and quick, eradicating boundaries between viewer and topic. And with Tremendous 8 being a silent format, the footage is augmented by David McAulay’s textured sound design and a delicate, uplifting soundtrack from Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres, which emphasises the fantastic thing about these pure topics, and the important connection between them and us.