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Join us for Opening Night of the 3rd Montrose LandxSea Film Festival!

We look forward to celebrating with you and setting the stage for a weekend filled with inspiring films and thought-provoking discussions.

Scottish Premiere. Lost for Words is a sensory odyssey across Britain’s four seasons, an immersive chorale that asks what we lose when words like "magpie", "willow", "bluebell", and "conker" slip from our tongues.

Inspired by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris's beloved book The Lost Words, the film soars across Britain's landscapes, rallying its subjects around precious nature rituals: children paint foxgloves from memory, elders trace forgotten words in fallen leaves, poets whisper "otter" beside misty rivers, scientists listen for starling murmuration under dusk skies.

Fusing art and science, each gesture—a wildflower brushed on canvas, a tide pool gently turned—becomes a living word, binding language to landscape and sparking wonder. In an age of erasure and climate reckoning, Lost for Words offers a gentle, but powerful rebellion, reminding us that naming the world is itself an act of care, and that every word saved keeps the wild alive.

🎤 Followed by live Q&A with director Hannah Papacek Harper, producer Gabriela Sawaya, and visual artist/writer Amanda Thomson.

💬 Post-film Q&A will be live captioned (CART). Learn more about access at the festival →

Director: Hannah Papacek Harper | Country: UK/France | Year: 2025 | Running Time: 93 min | Language: English and Gaelic | Rating: PG

Join us for Opening Night drinks after the screening!

🥂 Raise a glass! Join us in the Playhouse Bar to meet Festival filmmakers and special guests to kick-off a weekend of storytelling, ideas, and connection.

About the filmmaker: 

Hannah Papacek Harper is a writer and director with a background in Aesthetics and Cinema Practice from La Sorbonne Panthéon, France, and Universidad de Lima, Peru. Formerly a Steadicam operator, she now creates films exploring ecology, science, displacement, and transgenerational memory. Rooted in experimental video, her shorts Just Listen to the Storm and Vegetative screened internationally from 2021–2023. She is passionate about sensory, empathetic storytelling and making complex ideas accessible. Lost for Words is her feature documentary debut.

About the additional speakers: 

Gabriela Sawaya holds a degree in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and a Master’s in Environmental Studies and Anthropology from EHESS, France. Her research has focused on environmental justice, health, and migration, with a deep interest in people’s lived experiences. This led her from anthropology to filmmaking. Since 2022, she has worked as a documentary production manager at Retroviseur Productions, contributing to several films including Lost for Words and An Instance of Non-Existence.

Amanda Thomson is a Scottish artist and writer whose interdisciplinary practice spans creative non-fiction, printmaking, photography, and video. Her work explores place, belonging, and how we come to know the world through art and language. She holds a PhD in interdisciplinary arts from the University of the Highlands and Islands, with research focused on Scottish forests and how we come to know place through art-making and ethnographic practice. Her books include A Scots Dictionary of Nature (2018) and Belonging: natural histories of place, identity and home (2022), which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. She contributes to The Guardian's Country Diary and was Artist-in-Residence with Cairngorms Connect (2022-2024), a landscape restoration project exploring ecological belonging.

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