BEACON FILM SOCIETY: RIVER OF GRASS

Q&A with film director Sasha Wortzel to follow the screening.

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. We meet a mother taking on the polluting sugar industry; a two-spirit Miccosukee environmentalist and poet; a mother-daughter team removing snakes wreaking havoc on the ecosystem; and a family who have fished in the Everglades for six generations. 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.

The film is a critically acclaimed 2025 documentary. Winner of the prestigious Pare Lorentz Award at the 2025 International Documentary Association (IDA) Awards, which recognizes high-level filmmaking and environmental advocacy. The film also won the 2025 Mead Audience Award and the Florida Filmmaker Award at the Tallahassee Film Festival.

“Winking and wondrous… bewitching. This isn't a passive narrative.”
Robert Daniels (RogerEbert.com)

“A vivid love letter to the land and a call for its protection.”
Pat Mullen (POV Magazine)

*****
Sasha Wortzel (Director, Producer, Editor) 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. Wortzel is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video. Her films have screened world-wide at venues including MoMA DocFortnight, CPH:DOX, True/False, San Francisco International, Hot Docs, Dokufest, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her expanded cinematic work has been exhibited at the New Museum, The International Center for Photography, and The Kitchen, among others. Wortzel is a 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.