Shezad Dawood’s Leviathan: From the Forest to the Sea premieres the latest instalment in Dawood’s film series Leviathan Cycle. Episode 8: Cris, Sandra, Papa & Yasmine was developed remotely, in collaboration with Guarani scriptwriters, directors and activists Carlos Papá, Cristine Takuá, Sandra Benites, and Brazilian artist and researcher Anita Ekman. This film not only expands the collective and horizontal filmmaking method that has become a central feature of the cycle’s second half but reduces its own environmental impact through an intimate yet remote co-authorship.

Set in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest – one of the most ecologically diverse and threatened biomes on earth – It intersperses the imagined journey of Dawood’s protagonist Yasmine with accounts, songs and the retelling of foundational Guarani origin stories. Blending indigenous cosmology with fictional narrative, shot footage and especially commissioned animation by Anita Ekman, Episode 8 charts an embodied, spiritual and ecological journey along the age-old Guarani path that links the forest to the sea.

The plurality of voices involved in the Leviathan universe is manifested in the multiplicity of media throughout the show: from video to textile-based painting, and from traditional craft techniques to the research papers that contribute to each part of the process. The accompanying exhibited works interrogate histories of economic and social process, land-use, and our evolving relationship to the forest and the sea. In blending fact and speculative fiction, narrative and documentary, Dawood enacts a unique, sliding temporal scale that underlies the entire Leviathan project, connecting deep time to tentative future.