A Film by Sasha Wortzel

An ode to the Florida Everglades, told through the prescient writings of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and those who today call the region home. 


“winking and wondrous…bewitching…this isn’t a passive narrative”

Synopsis

www.rogerebert.com

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.

CREATIVE TEAM

  • is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. Raised in Southwest Florida and based in New York City, Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored from these regions’ histories. Her films have screened at MoMA DocFortnight, CPH:DOX, True/False, DOC NYC, BAMcinemaFest, San Francisco International, New Orleans Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her expanded cinematic work has recently been exhibited at the New Museum, The International Center for Photography, and The Kitchen. Wortzel is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2023 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Oolite Arts Ellies Award, and 2017 NYFA Fellowship. RIVER OF GRASS is her first feature documentary. The film has received institutional support from Sundance, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Doc Society, Chicken & Egg Pictures, and Sandbox Films. Her short films include HOW TO CARRY WATER (2023), an IDA Awards nominee for best short documentary and currently streaming on Criterion Channel; THIS IS AN ADDRESS (2020) distributed by Field of Vision; and HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARSHA! (2018; co-director Tourmaline) which won special mention at Outfest. Her artwork is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. She has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America.

  • is a nonfiction producer who has been working in documentary film for the past decade. She most recently produced SEEDS (Sundance 2025), A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (True/False 2024), and LIGHT OF THE SETTING SUN (Full Frame 2024), which is a co-production of ITVS and Independent Lens. Varga co-produced THE STROLL (Sundance 2023, HBO), winner of the Sundance jury award and a Peabody. She produced Bulletproof (SXSW 2020) and the critically acclaimed documentary THE HOTTEST AUGUST (True/False 2019) both of which are distributed by PBS Independent Lens and Grasshopper Film. She co-produced the award-winning and Oscar shortlisted film CAMERAPERSON (Sundance 2016). She has also produced a number of programs for television such as PBS Art21 series. Varga was a 2016-2017 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow and was selected in DOC NYC’s inaugural “40 under 40” class. She’s been an advisor for Sundance, a mentor for emerging filmmakers, and a consultant.

  • is a Director of Photography from Miami, Florida whose cinematography includes YOU WERE MY FIRST BOYFRIEND (SXSW 2023), IT’S ONLY LIFE AFTER ALL (Sundance 2023), and HOW TO CARRY WATER (CPH:DOX 2023). Their work has been showcased at Sundance, Tribeca, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Frameline, and the Whitney Biennial. Bennett has worked with directors Spike Lee, Arthur Jafa, Deb Shoval, and Andrew Dosunmu. Bennett has also worked alongside master cinematographers such as Lisa Rinzler, Bradford Young ASC, and Michael McDonough ASC as a camera operator, gaffer and key grip. Bennett is a recipient of the ASC Vision Mentorship Award and Artists in Residence in the Everglades (AIRIE) Fellowship.

  • is an award-winning video editor born and raised in Puerto Rico, focusing on vérité and archival heavy, character-driven stories. She was an editor on the nine part HBO documentary series THE VOW and worked on three seasons of the Emmy-award winning series VICE on HBO. Among others, she edited feature length documentaries RESIDENTE (SXSW, 2017) and verite driven HOMEROOM (Sundance, 2021), for which she received Sundance’s 2021 Inaugural Jonathan Oppenheim Documentary Editing Award. She is a 2022 nominee for Cinema Eye Honors’ Outstanding Achievement in Editing award and for IDA’s Best Editing Award. She was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Picture Editing in 2016.

  • is a Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist. She writes music for voices, orchestras, and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. Angélica is known for playing with the unexpected intersection of classical and electronic music, unusual instruments, and found sounds. Upcoming premieres include a cello concerto performed by Yo-Yo Ma and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and a requiem for Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Recent commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia (a drag opera film in collaboration with Mathew Placek and Sasha Velour), New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the NY Botanical Garden, Kronos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and her Carnegie Hall debut, commissioned and performed by Sō Percussion. She regularly performs a solo show and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún. As an educator, Angélica has been a teaching artist with NY Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program and with Lincoln Center Education. Angélica lives in Brooklyn, where she’s always looking for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work.

  • is an Emmy-nominated producer who specializes in nonfiction, archive-based films. Working between Miami, FL and New York, NY, her work has been featured on HBO, PBS, WORLD Channel, Field of Vision, NYT Op-Docs, YouTube Originals, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She produced John Maggio’s feature documentary, PAUL ANKA: HIS WAY (Toronto 2024) and the News & Doc Emmy-nominated A CHOICE OF WEAPONS: INSPIRED BY GORDON PARKS (Tribeca 2021, HBO). She has contributed archival research to productions LONG TIME SUN (SXSW, 2024) and KISS THE FUTURE (Berlinale, 2023). She has an MFA in Documentary Film from Wake Forest University and was a 2023-2024 Impact Partners Producing Fellow.

  • is a Miami-based LatinX documentary filmmaker. Her directing and producing debut, MONICA & DAVID, broadcast on HBO, won Tribeca’s Jury Award and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Her latest documentary, PAPER CHILDREN, premiered worldwide with YouTube Originals, with support from Sundance Institute, Perspective Fund, Knight Foundation and Chicken & Egg Pictures. Ali has pitched at Hot Docs:Forum, Good Pitch, CPH:Forum, and Tribeca All Access. Her work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Newsweek, Univision’s Primer Impacto, The Huffington Post, CNN en Español, LATimes, Latina Magazine, etc. She is currently developing a film about the human brain.  

  • is a Two-Spirit Poet, filmmaker, and environmentalist from the Otter Clan of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. Cypress serves as the head of Love The Everglades Movement, an organization devoted to the development of platforms and initiatives for environmental protection, and cultural preservation.

  • was editor on Oscar and double Sundance Audience Award-winning, NAVALNY (2022), and SUGARCANE (2024), which won the Sundance Directing Award. She co-edited CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (dir. Werner Herzog) with partner Joe Bini. Supervising and Consulting Editor credits include JOONAM (Sundance 2023), BLACK BOX DIARIES (Sundance 2024), and A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (True/False 2024). She has been an advisor at seven Sundance labs since 2017, a 2018 fellow at the Sundance Nonfiction Directors Residency, and a 2020 Sundance Interdisciplinary Fellow. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  • edited the Academy Award nominated documentary short IN THE ABSENCE, directed by Seung-jun Yi, and Reid Davenport’s feature documentary I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE, which won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and the Truer than Fiction Independent Spirit Award. He frequently works as a consulting editor, most recently on the films SUGARCANE and MILISUTHANDO.

  • is an experimental practice that merges field studies, art, and landscape research to explore place through a holistic framework. Through drifting and deep listening, the Miami-based project employs sound art to cultivate deeper, more intentional modes of listening. Archival Feedback maps diverse environments, engaging with the intersections of ecology, perception, and sonic experience. Their work is an urgent offering, a call to hear the world not as backdrop, but as chorus. Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo are based in Miami, Fl.

Upcoming screenings

Saturday November 15 @ 10aM

Gilmmerglass Film Days, Fenimore Art Museum
Cooperstown, NY

GET TICKETS

MONday November 17 @ 7PM

BIG ARTS
Sanibel Island, FL

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Thursday November 6 & Sunday November 9 @ 7PM

TAURON American Film Festival
Wroclaw, Poland

GET TICKETS

Past screenings

True/False Film fest

Columbia, MO

February 27, 2025

Miami Film Festival

Miami, FL

April 09, 2025

Sarasota Film Festival

Sarasota, FL

April 12, 2025

Hot Docs

Toronto, CA

April 02, 2025

Margaret Mead Film Festival

New York, NY

May 04, 2025

Cinéspeak Under the Stars

Philadelphia, PA

May 30, 2025

DC/DOX

Washington DC

June 14, 2025

Bellwether Series, Amherst Cinema

Amherst, MA

August 14, 2025

Cornell Cinema

Ithaca, NY

October 2, 2025

FRAMELINE

Oakland, CA

June 22, 2025

Dokufest

Prizen, Kosovo

August 03, 2025

Climate Film Festival

New York, NY

September 20, 2025

Tallahassee Film Festival

Tallahassee, FL

September 27, 2025

Refocus Film Festival

Iowa City, IA

October 10-12, 2025

Woodstock Film Festival

Woodstock, NY

October 15, 2025

Unorthodocs

Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH

November 08, 2025

Coral Gables Art Cinema

Miami, FL

October 17 - 23, 2025

Guelph Film Festival

Guelph, ON

November 07, 2025

Subtropic Film Festival

Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL

November 08, 2025

DCTV FIREHOUSE Cinema

New York, NY

October 24 - 30, 2025

Press                

  • ROGEREBERT.COM

    Robert Daniels

    “Wortzel’s film is a clarion call to protect Florida’s greatest resource.”

  • THE MOVEABLE FEST

    Steven Saito

    "A variety of perspectives add up to something as exquisitely crystalline, allowing you to get lost in its beauty without losing sight of how easily broken it can be."

  • FILMAKER MAGAZINE

    Patricia Aufderheide

    "A rare environmental film to succeed both in expressing collective grief about climate change and inspiring activism to adapt and resist further depradations."

  • SCREEN SLATE

    Saffron Maeve

    "affectionately cluttered, with the community’s competing methodologies given the latitude to freely coexist."

  • POV MAGAZINE

    Pat Mullen

    “…a vivid love letter to the land and a call for its protection.”

  • FILMMAKER MAGZINE

    Lauren Wissot

    “…in Wortzel’s cinematic Everglades, humans are merely one fleeting creature in a far more complex ecosystem, a world where birds, reptiles, plants and water are there to show us the care-taking way.”

  • WNYC DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK

    Raphaela Neihausen and Thom Powers

    “…a poetic call to action.”

  • MOVIEJAWN

    Zakiyyah Madyun

    “A truly creative feat of environmental storytelling, River of Grass is a quiet marvel that listens more than it speaks, and makes all the bigger impact for it.”

  • THE ARTS STL

    Sarah Boslaugh

    “Wortzel builds her case primarily through the stories of individuals who share their personal relationships with the region, paired with stunning cinematography."

  • VOX MAGAZINE

    Tre Kent

    “a mosaic of past and present…capturing its [the Everglades] wonder and reassuring the audience that there is still much beauty to save."

  • AUTOSTRADDLE

    Juan Barquin

    “…a necessary document about the Everglades at this point in time and a personal reflection on what it means to connect with other communities for the greater good..”