Gaby Iori, The Well, Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021
Carolina professor and filmmaker Julia Haslett, who’s latest documentary tells the story of conservationists restoring rhododendrons to their native China, brings the natural world to the screen and to her classroom.
We may take for granted the plants in our front yards. However, Carolina faculty member and filmmaker Julia Haslett wants us to think about how these everyday shrubs might have unique, even dramatic stories of their own.
In 2015, Haslett, who was born in England, was in her godfather’s garden in Scotland, working on a short film about a group of rhododendron enthusiasts. Through conversations with them, Haslett learned that rhododendrons — part of a genus of more than 1,000 woody plants in the heath family — were brought from China to the United Kingdom over 100 years ago by “colonial-era plant hunters” and are now endangered in China. The story inspired Haslett to expand her short film into a feature-length documentary, “Pushed up the Mountain,” that follows the efforts of tireless conservation biologists and botanists who care deeply about preserving rhododendrons in the face of a changing natural environment.
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