The Peace of Wild Things: Filmmaker Laura Dunn takes another look at Wendell Berry

By Kevin Murphy Wilson Photos Provided

Laura Dunn is an award-winning documentary filmmaker known for weaving compelling narratives that are insightful, persuasive, and resonate deeply with audiences. Her many honors include a Student Academy Award, Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, Yale’s Trumbull Fine Arts Prize, International Documentary Association Pare Lorenz Grant and an Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction Award. We recently caught up with the Austin-based director/writer/editor/professor/activist via phone to discuss Look & See Further, a captivating “afterword” of sorts to the beloved Wendell Berry film, Look & See, that Dunn originally co-directed with her husband and frequent collaborator Jef Sewell. The new project will be released in October 2025 via the couple’s Two Birds Film company as ten standalone short films that are “of a piece.” 

VOICE-TRIBUNE: What initially led you to Wendell Berry as a subject? 

Laura Dunn: “When I ended up working on what became my first feature film [The Unforeseen] with Terrence Malick and Robert Redford [serving as Executive Producers], it was about politics, pollution, development, and the quest to save a beautiful spring here in Austin, Texas. It’s sort of like Chinatown [which was said to be inspired by the early 20th century water wars in California], you know, but in documentary form. And that film actually led me to Wendell Berry.” 

VT: How familiar were you with Berry’s catalog up to that point, and in what way did that literary acquaintance influence The Unforeseen project? 

LD: “Well, I had read a number of his books when I was in high school [in Durham, NC]. I really loved his poetry. And since my mom is a maize geneticist, I also grew up with a lot of schooling about sustainable agriculture, which included [Berry’s monumental nonfiction tome] ‘The Unsettling of America.’ When I was making The Unforeseen it was sort of like, if you do the math about all the environmental pollution and the numbers, we’re doomed. So, it was very depressing, and I was looking for something hopeful, some other kind of element that I could put in there. That’s when I found inspiration in one of his poems called ‘Santa Clara Valley.’ And I just fell in love with it because it describes a pretty bleak [man-made] situation but then at the end, he [the narrator] comes across this little pool of water and in it there’s all this life springing forth. Incredibly there’s this sort of hope in the unforeseen. I wrote to him and asked him if I could record him reading the poem for the film. And he wrote me back and invited me to come visit him. So, I did.” 

VT: When would that have been? 

LD: “It was February of 2004, I think. My boyfriend, now my husband [Jef Sewell], and I drove to Kentucky and met Wendell and he allowed us to capture just a voice recording of that poem. And that began kind of my connection with him.” 

VT: Were viewers intrigued by that component of the film? Did it have the intended effect? 

LD: “Absolutely. When we finished that film, it played at Sundance [Film Festival], it won a Spirit Award, it played at other festivals all over the world. His presence weaves throughout the film. It’s sort of this, you know, otherworldly voice that brings a lovely poetic element to the film. And people would always ask me, who is that voice? And I would say, ‘Well, that’s Wendell Berry,’ thinking, of course they would go, ‘Oh, yeah!’ That didn’t usually happen though. I was so struck. Certain people knew Wendell and Wendell was so important to them, but a lot of people didn’t know about Wendell Berry at all. So when we finished that film, Robert Redford asked me what I wanted to do next, and indicated that he wanted to help me. I suggested we should do something about Wendell Berry. My thought was, you know, a film version of the ‘Unsettling of America.’ And Bob [Redford] really loved that book when it came out in the 70s. So we immediately connected on that and Terry [Malick] also really loved Wendell Berry’s work. So we kind of got the team back together and said, well, let’s make a film. But it took a while because Wendell didn’t want to actually be filmed and, you know, there was a lot of back and forth letter writing. At times it sounded like a yes, and then it was a no.” 

VT: How did you come to terms with the fact that he refused to appear on camera for you? 

LD: “His reasons were pretty specific. I mean, he thinks that film, television, and the screen contributes to the decline of literacy. That it, you know, is a negative force in the world. I think that’s generally his perspective. I mean, that’s what he would say to me, but, you know, at the same time he has friends like [Kentucky author] James Baker Hall, who take lots of photographs and even make short films. And I know he worked on that beautiful ‘Wilderness’ book with [Lexington-based photographer] Ralph Eugene Meatyard. So he has a real respect for image-makers, photography in particular. But I think the moving image is really a different thing, and I think he’s watched it become so dominant in our culture and he thinks it deadens the imagination. He does. So he’s against the screen as a medium, number one. Number two, he often would say things to me, and I’m paraphrasing him, because I can only tell you the gist of what he says so perfectly, but basically that he didn’t want to be made an idol of, that, you know, he would say he’s not anything but for the people around him and for his place, that ‘I am my place.’ He didn’t want the story to fixate on him. And he also just hates being on camera. He’s very awkward. He’ll tell you that he hates it. So there were a number of reasons, and I was thinking, okay, well, we probably don’t need to do this. But [Berry’s wife] Tanya invited me to come. And she wanted me to come. And I was like, okay, well, you don’t want us to film you, but then what can we do? And I just accepted that constraint and thought, well, this constraint actually tells me a lot about him. So I always tell my students that, you know, constraint is a gift. Constraint is where all the opportunity is.” 

VT: Looking back, are you satisfied with the visual stories you were able to tell in Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry and the new collection of vignettes compiled from your original sessions, Look & See Further? 

LD: “Like I said, I didn’t look at it [Berry’s refusal to be filmed] as a negative thing. I looked at it as an opportunity, fortunately one that was enhanced by the photographs of Jim Hall. How difficult was it to find the workaround? I mean, what I decided was to just film Wendell’s place [in Henry County]. He would let me come and record conversations with him, audio only. And we did that several times. I think there’s like nine hours altogether [Look & See Further was built around the abundance of outtakes]. But I still wondered, how do you visualize his story? And when we really dug into the Jim Hall archive, that’s when I realized, okay, you know, we can make the portrait a sense of him, even if we don’t film him. And in a way, I think you see him more clearly. My kind of understanding is that you see his mind’s eye. You know, you don’t see his face but you see what he thinks and you see what he sees both in the original film and in the 10 new shorts that are getting released this October [2025].” 

For more information, visit twobirdsfilm.com.