Screenings, talks, and conversations on ecology, climate care, and making multispecies relations
Nature Girl (2025, 27 mins) is a joyful, relational film created by filmmaker Trent Maynard in collaboration with shíshálh Nation cultural educator and knowledge keeper xets’emits’a – Candace Campo.
Shaped by years of listening to land and animals in a coastal wetland, the film unfolds through quiet moments of beauty, curiosity, and connection.
Nature Girl invites audiences to rediscover care, relationship, and hope through the simple, transformative act of paying attention to place.
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About the film
Nature Girl was created over five years of repeated visits to the same forest pool and animal scratch tree on the lands of the shíshálh (Sechelt) Nation on the Sunshine Coast, BC.
Using trail cameras as a form of quiet witnessing, the filmmakers allow animals, water, and forest to move through the frame on their own terms.
Along the way, we meet black bears, elk, deer, cougars, frogs, newts, and birds as they return to the wetland over time, revealing moments of play, humour, and surprising multispecies coexistence.
Subverting the conventions of traditional nature documentaries, the film is an experiment in relational filmmaking shaped by Indigenous ways of knowing, queer ecology and long-term attention to place.
Why this film matters
In a time when environmental stories are often shaped by urgency, crisis, trauma and loss, Nature Girl offers something unique and more sustaining. The film begins from the understanding that care grows from relationship—and that relationship takes time.
By staying with one place over years, Nature Girl invites a different way of engaging with ecological questions. Rather than asking what can be taken or fixed, the film asks what becomes possible when we slow down, remain present, and learn to listen.
Audiences often describe the experience of watching the film as calming, grounding, and unexpectedly joyful. In witnessing moments of play, humour, and shared presence among many species, viewers are reminded that beauty and connection are not distractions from climate and land care—they are essential to it.
Screenings, Talks & Conversations
Screenings of Nature Girl are conceived as shared experiences. We began sharing our work at gallery (Gibsons Public Art Gallery, Polygon Gallery) and festival screenings (Sechelt Arts Festival, Sunshine Coast Arts Crawl) before opening up our film to a wider audience. Our film screenings are typically followed by a conversation or Q&A, shaped to the context, audience, and intentions of the host.
These gatherings invite reflection, listening, and dialogue—creating space to think together about relationship, responsibility, and care in a time of ecological change.
Want to partner on a screening? Possible formats include:
- Film screenings
- Screening + Q&A
- Screening + artist talk
- Conversations and workshops on ecology, climate care, and relationship with land
- Educational screenings for schools, universities, and research groups
- Community screenings in libraries, galleries, museums, and cultural spaces
About the filmmakers
Nature Girl is a collaboration between filmmaker Trent Maynard and shíshálh Nation cultural educator and knowledge keeper Candace Campo.
The film emerges from long-term relationship with place and from ongoing conversations about listening, responsibility, and care. Shaped through years of shared attention to land and more-than-human presence, the project reflects a commitment to ethical, place-based practice and to making work that is accountable to the places and beings it engages.
Rather than approaching land as a backdrop or resource, their collaboration centres relationship—allowing meaning to emerge through time, presence, and mutual respect.
Booking a screening or talk
Want to host a Nature Girl event? We welcome invitations to co-create Nature Girl screenings, talks, and conversations with festivals, communities, institutions, and organizations.
Each event is shaped in dialogue with hosts to reflect place, audience, and intention.
Please fill out our Screening Requests form to start the conversation. We look forward to hearing from you!
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