Home - Possible Landscapes Film

Caribbean Landscapes and Everyday Life An Enquiry into Environmental Experience

Possible Landscapes is a poignant exploration of intergenerational experiences of Caribbean environments shot over two seasons in Trinidad and Tobago. Across sugarcane fields, steep hillsides, on fishing boats and through dying coral reefs, the film presents intimate portraits of people in their daily lives and examines the impacts of colonial legacies, post-independence aspirations, and the evolving forces of extractivism.

The Genesis of “Possible Landscapes”
A Collaborative Research Project

A collaboration between a documentary filmmaker, Kannan Arunasalam and two professors, Tao DuFour (Architecture) a spatial theorist and Natalie Melas (Comparative Literature) a postcolonial comparatist and student of Caribbean thought, Possible Landscapes is the outcome of the team research project, “Possible Landscapes: Documenting Environmental Experience in Trinidad and Tobago,” funded through a grant from Cornell University’s Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge and the Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative.

Kannan Arunasalam - Documentary Filmmaker and Artist
Tao DuFour - Architecture - Spatial Theorist
Natalie Melas - Comparative Literature - Postcolonial Comparatist

Researching “Possible Landscapes” Methods, Aims, and Historical Inquiry

The Possible Landscapes research project set out to develop methods of field research and representation, drawing on the visual and narrative resources of documentary film, that foreground intergenerational lived experience of landscapes and environments in the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and to query the formation of environmental and climate imaginaries, with a view to getting at larger historical questions—of migration, plantation societies, extractivism, the legacies of colonialism and post-independence struggles—that inform everyday practices in ways that are difficult to identify and to articulate, because they are concretely lived.