Super Nature: Ed Sayers’ Super 8 documentary is a beautiful ode to nature’s restorative power

“I did not speak much before I worked with the rhinos,” explains Zacharia, a park ranger at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya who is now devoted to helping the last remaining northern white rhino back from the brink of extinction – a passion that has led him to find his voice so that he might become their champion. He is just one of the array of human and non-human characters whose lives and perspectives are briefly portrayed in Ed Sayers’ luminous and soul-soothing patchwork documentary Super Nature. Composed of Super 8 footage shot on dozens of cameras by more than 40 collaborators, the film observes the natural world in 25 countries. It’s a tapestry of miniature encounters, each with its own personality, that coalesce into a beguiling and restorative whole.

Sayers has history with Super 8, a film format that has immediate associations with home movies and nostalgia. He founded the Straight 8 competition, which celebrates creativity in Super 8 filmmaking – and it was watching a 2019 entry, Nature Hunter by Roger Batteault, that planted the first seeds of this film. Batteault’s short captures flamingos feeding on a shimmering lake. Sayers was seduced by its sincerity, its radiance, and something more essential. He was moved not only to take his own Super 8 camera to a local beach in Norfolk to film basking seals, but to bring together a wealth of such moments from around the world into this spellbinding whole.

To Sayers’ mind, shooting on celluloid imposes a sense of intentionality. The filmmaker has a finite amount of film – a roll will only yield two and a half minutes of footage. They must be deliberate about what they focus on and when they choose to press record. This echoes broader social and cultural thinking about the mindfulness of the analogue, the tendency to eschew a smartphone or choose to listen to vinyl as a guard against the ubiquity of the digital. For Sayers, shooting on film might emphasise the difference between seeing and active looking.

The idea may be built on solid assumptions, but it does not, alone, a stirring documentary make. Super Nature functions as a feature film because of two things: Sayers’ recurring voiceover, tracing narrative through-lines, and some striking nature documentary footage. Sayers does an impressive job as editor and narrator, finding meaningful correlations and contrasts which cultivate the sense of watching a portrait of a dynamic world. The restrictions of the format keep each section very short, but they never feel isolated from one another. This is helped no end by reflections from the contributors that are personal and profound.

It is a film of beautiful images, the grain of the celluloid making them feel somehow more authentic than the crisp hyperreality of much modern natural history programming. The format’s texture creates connotations of a bygone time, seeming to blend the past and the present, as in the footage of Carlotta, who discusses her family’s life in the Alps and their historical connection to the ibex – the mountain goats, known for their nimble footwork, who also make their homes there. In Delhi, Simran relates her fear of the city’s monkey population, the look of her images lending an almost mythic quality to her childhood concerns before she reveals the comfort she has found through studying the monkeys. The standout sequence, filmed from a microlight, shows a skein of orphaned barnacle geese being taught their migration path; a stunning account, the perspective giving the impression that we are right on the wing as they soar over the landscapes of southern France.

“When we allow ourselves to get close to nature, no matter how we do it, we discover a feeling that lives deep within us,” suggests Isabelle, as she sits among the characterful puffins of Skomer Island, off the coast of south-west Wales. This is a common refrain from contributors, whether they are capturing the ravaging impacts of the climate crisis or chasing weedy sea-dragons through the shallows; their engagement with the natural world is transformative. Jimmy, a Maasai man in Kenya, describes the lion as shifting from enemy to friend: “I have a lot of love for them now.” This is perhaps the more fundamental element of Super Nature. The celluloid is glorious to behold, but it also projects an experiential quality that highlights the film’s power: showing us how nourishing nature is when we just stop and take the time to observe it.

► Super Nature is in UK cinemas from 4 September.