River of Grass press photo.
Audio By Carbonatix
Since Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote her seminal 1947 book, The Everglades: River of Grass, it’s been a revelatory and remains a modern-day guide to the Everglades, according to director Sasha Wortzel. That’s why when she created the 2025 film, River of Grass, she asked herself: “How do we bring this text, which is in many ways, kind of a survival guide into the future, to the cinema?”
The film, which will be released at Coral Gables Art Cinema this week, is a reimagining of the book with archival footage of the author and the voices of modern-day Everglades residents, including the protagonist, environmentalist and Miccosukee Tribe member Betty Osceola. To “build out the cinematic world of the Everglades,” she says, Wortzel teamed up with experimental duo Archival Feedback, who use recordings from the Everglades to shape their soundscapes.
Same Threats, Different Century
Just as they were in Douglas’s time, the Everglades are in peril: climate change threatens the ecosystem and Indigenous residents, federal layoffs and a governmental shutdown hamper access and protections of this precious aquifer, and an environmentally unsound detention camp for immigrants created a humanitarian crisis.
Fifty-five years ago, Douglas herself fought to keep that same site from being developed as a massive airport. That’s why she founded Friends of the Everglades, which today leads the fight against “Alligator Alcatraz.”
“At a time where people might not pick up Marjory’s book, cinema could be a way to bring the knowledge of her book, of how this system worked, of how it impacts not just the water, but people, plants, animals, a broader ‘we’ and to put that text in conversation with people like Betty Osceola, who are really connecting people to a sense of place, and educating the public and moving us, and using prayer as a source of resistance right now, too,” Wortzel explains.
Her relationship with Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo of Archival Feedback blossomed in 2017 while Wortzel was at Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE), a partnership with Everglades National Park. Through this AIRIE residency, Wortzel also met the participants who became characters in the film and developed a visual style and sound aesthetic with Archival Feedback.
“We hit it off immediately,” says Wortzel. The two had completed their residency the year prior. She invited them to meet in person for “a slumber party in the Everglades National Park. Tom and Emilie drove out and spent the entire night recording, roaming around, collecting sounds,” she says.
“It was probably one of the most intense recording experiences we’ve ever had,” Wheeler Castillo says of their night recording at a water-level boardwalk. “We were just in this cacophony of frogs.”
Wheeler Castillo and Milgrim already knew that nighttime was the best time to record the natural sounds of the area. “I thought I was being so clever by picking February [for the AIRIE residency]. The weather is the best. But guess what? Everybody else wants to be out there, too. And so when you’re trying to record, all we were picking up was cars and planes overhead,” Wheeler Castillo says.
“There’s a lot of sitting and waiting and just letting anything happen,” explains Milgrim of their process. “Sometimes you sit somewhere for three hours and nothing happens, but that’s OK, that’s part of the experience. And to me, that’s the most valuable part, creating these sonic memories and experiences that live in your mind and in your personal history.”
Moons Over Miami
During lockdown in 2020, when their projects were in limbo, Archival Feedback created a soundtrack to Coral City Camera, the underwater coral reef camera by artists Coral Morphologic, that helped get viewers through the lockdown during early pandemic days. It premiered on music website Pitchfork with a rave review and included a remix of an orchestral version of the classic song “Moon Over Miami” by Percy Faith, who played music in Miami Beach in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Encouraged, they decided to update and reimagine the song again. Though the song was first recorded in the mid-1930s, he fell in love with Sarah Vaughn’s 1960s version. “We found this orchestral version of ‘Moon Over Miami’ recorded at Flamingo Hotel in Miami Beach. We made it wild and beautiful and reconsidered. And that ended up on the playlist that did really well with Pitchfork, and it was kind of like, OK, there’s something here,” Wheeler Castillo says.
They decided to do an invitational, asking musicians to reimagine the song themselves. Wheeler Castillo penned new lyrics with Rev. Houston R. Cypress (who is consulting producer and featured in the film) and they released their own Moon Over Miami seven-track album.
He says the song and compilation address the question: “What does it mean for the moon over Miami across time?” When it was first recorded, “Climate changes were already happening, but not the way we’re feeling it.”
The song is featured in the film and the trailer. The other soundscapes used in the feature were largely pulled from their catalog of natural sounds and offer an essential and urgent energy to the stunning visuals.
Archival Feedback also celebrated the ten-year anniversary of their inaugural self-titled release, which featured raw field recordings and songs by six artists with performances and new tracks. That includes a commission by Bakehouse Art Complex for a sound installation for its 40th anniversary. They also recently performed a piece with panther sounds at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU for the exhibition “Path of the Panther.”
Archival Feedback Presenta: moon Over miami by Various Artists
The Fight Continues
“If you live here in Florida, you’re always part of some sort of fight, save the manatees, beach cleanups, and know that there are forces in the world that are greater than you, who are undoing a lot of your effort and your work. So [art] opens up this dialogue where we can reflect on it and celebrate it,” Wheeler Castillo explains. “That’s why the film is so important. It reminds us that there’s also so much work that we’ve got to encourage the next generation to help.”
“It’s easy to feel very unmoored and a little bit disempowered and perhaps overwhelmed and frankly — how I was feeling — full of grief and not knowing how to move forward,” shares Wortzel. She believes the Archival Feedback’s sonic endeavors and the film might allow people the artistic and emotional tools to connect, not only to the place, but also to each other, the past, and present-day activism.
“I’m thinking about this moment in the film where [an interviewer says to] Marjory Stoneman Douglas: ‘Do you think the war will ever be won?’ And she says, ‘Maybe not, probably not in the way we want it to be, but you have to keep on fighting.’ Betty Osceola echoes that in the film.”
River of Grass will be released in theaters on Oct. 17 at Coral Gables Art Cinema with a week of screenings. Opening weekend will include curated Q&As with the film team on Friday, a conversion “No Airports, No Prisons, Only Everglades” with Betty Osceola and Eve Samples from Friends of the Everglades, and on Sunday, a conversation about intergenerational stewardship with Donna Kalil, Deanna Kalil, and Houston Cypress.
