Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
[in development]
supported by: LEF Moving Image Fund
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is an experimental documentary that drifts with wildfire smoke and the traces it leaves behind—on landscapes, bodies, memories, and ways of seeing. Moving between the environmental and intimate, the film explores smoke as both a material consequence of climate change and a catalyst for rethinking our relationships to place, time, perception, and one another.
FILM SUMMARY
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is an experimental documentary about wildfire smoke and the traces it leaves behind—on landscapes, bodies, memories, and ways of seeing. Smoke obscures visibility and destabilizes orientation; the film responds by embracing gentle fragmentation, where images, sounds, and memories move associatively rather than linearly. The film drifts through places across northeastern North America transformed by wildfire and smoke, collecting testimony, observation, atmosphere, and landscape into a poetic and immersive cinematic experience.
Central to the film are media diaries collected from participants across Canada and the United States during wildfire smoke events. Influenced by social media vernaculars, these recordings capture extemporaneous first-person observations of smoke’s effects on everyday life. Participants describe orange skies and hazy light, the smell, changes in routine, and feelings of awe and fear about the causes and implications of increasingly severe fire seasons. Together, these diaristic media create a polyphony of wildfire smoke’s impacts through multiple geographies, generations, and subjectivities.
These voices are woven together with conversations with environmental scientists, forest and conservation workers, and trauma psychologists. These conversations illuminate why smoke changes the sky’s color, how fine particulates move through the body, how fire alters ecosystems and communities, and the psychological fog that can accompany prolonged crises. Rather than offering definitive explanations, the film allows these perspectives to circulate alongside lived experience, expanding the film’s emotional, ecological, and sensory dimensions.
Fire complicates the act of witnessing through the danger it poses to anything proximal and by hindering visibility. In response, the film develops an experimental, sensory ethnographic approach to smoke and fire. The film includes observational footage shot in locations directly impacted by the 2023 wildfire season and contemporaneous to the time of filmmaking, including Lebel-sur-Quévillon and Chibougamau, Quebec, as well as regions affected indirectly through drifting smoke. This footage will be shot on a combination of digital and super-8 film. The analogue film media will be hand-processed and treated using smoke, ash, heat, and fire, allowing smoke to contribute directly to the filmic image. The inclusion of analogue media offers a visceral visual texture, where landscapes flicker, decay, and change.
Sound plays a central role in the film’s form. The sound design treats the environment as an equal voice alongside the human, blending sync and non-sync sound, field recordings, atmospheric textures, and fragments of speech. The soundtrack blurs the boundary between the human and nonhuman world, treating the environment not as background, but as an active presence within the film.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes treats smoke both as subject and cinematic language: something that drifts between people and places, carrying evidence of distant events while reshaping perception in the present and of the future. Historically, smoke functioned as a medium for communication capable of carrying complex messages across distance. The film inhabits the atmosphere in both intimate and expansive ways to explore and restore the complexity of language between the environment and how we see, feel, remember, and imagine.