Film Screening: River of Grass, Directed by Sasha Wortzel

“RIVER OF GRASS” (2025) is a present-day reimagining of environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s celebrated book, “The Everglades: River of Grass” (1947), which forever changed the public’s understanding of the area from worthless swamps to an essential source of freshwater, enabling the ecosystem to endure, just barely, today. In the wake of a hurricane, Douglas visits filmmaker Sasha Wortzel in a dream, catalyzing a prismatic journey across the Everglades with Miccosukee educator and activist Betty Osceola. Interweaving Douglas’s writing, personal narration, present-day verité, and archival footage, RIVER OF GRASS reveals how this country’s origin story haunts and inextricably shapes contemporary American life, while asking how we might weather coming storms better together. Winner of numerous awards including the Tallahassee Film Festival, Florida Filmmaker Award (2025) https://www.riverofgrassfilm.com/.

Wortzel is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist using video, installation, sculpture, and sound to explore how past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Raised in Southwest Florida and based in New York, Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored from these regions’ histories. Wortzel is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video. Wortzel received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. Her films have screened at venues world-wide including at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, CPH:DOX, True/False, Hot Docs, San Francisco International, and Dokufest. Her expanded cinematic work has been exhibited at the New Museum, The International Center for Photography, and The Kitchen. In 2022, her exhibition Dreams of Unknown Islands was exhibited at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery and later travelled to the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College, where Wortzel was also an artist in residence in 2021.

RIVER OF GRASS (2025) is her first feature documentary. The film won the Pare Lorentz Award from IDA, Hot Docs Joan VanDuzer Special Jury Prize – International Feature Documentary, and Mead Audience Award, among others. The film received institutional support from Sundance, Ford Foundation, Sandbox Films, Knight Foundation, Doc Society, Field of Vision, and Chicken & Egg Pictures. Her short films include HOW TO CARRY WATER (2023), an IDA Awards nominee for best short documentary and currently streaming on Criterion Channel; THIS IS AN ADDRESS (2020) distributed by Field of Vision; and HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARSHA! (2018; co-director Tourmaline) which won special mention at Outfest and is in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum of Harlem. Her artwork is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. She has participated in residencies at MacDowell, Fine Arts Work Center, and Artists in Residence in the Everglades (AIRIE). Wortzel has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America.

Anne Schindler (Jacksonville, FL) joined WJCT News as host of First Coast Connect in October 2023, after nearly three decades in Jacksonville print and television. Schindler has worked in the Jacksonville media market since 1995, first as a reporter for the original Folio Weekly, then as the publication’s editor-in-chief from 2002 until her departure. In 2012, she transitioned to television as executive producer of special projects for First Coast News, Northeast Florida’s NBC and ABC affiliates. Schindler graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in journalism. Her first job in journalism was at the Twin Cities Reader, under the paper’s then-editor, David Carr. She currently serves as chair of the Northeast Florida Media Committee and is a member of the University of North Florida School of Communication’s Professional Advisory Board. Her credits include a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative journalism, eight Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards and five NATAS Suncoast Emmy Awards, including in the investigative reporting and topical documentary categories.