Possible Landscapes

(2025, 105 mins, Trinidad & Tobago / United States, HD video with sound)

Possible Landscapes is a collaboration between artist and filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam, architect and spatial theorist Tao DuFour, and comparative literature scholar Natalie Melas, a postcolonial comparatist specialising in Caribbean thought. The film emerged from the research project Possible Landscapes: Documenting Environmental Experience in Trinidad and Tobago, supported by Cornell University’s Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge and the Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative.

Shot across two seasons in Trinidad and Tobago, the film follows communities living among sugarcane fields, mountain valleys, coral reefs, oil landscapes and fishing villages. Through observational filmmaking and intimate portraits of everyday life, it examines how colonial legacies, post-independence aspirations and changing forms of extractivism continue to shape relationships between people and place.

Bringing together film practice and interdisciplinary research, Possible Landscapes considers landscape not simply as setting, but as a lived environment where histories of labour, migration, ecological transformation and environmental change continue to inhabit the present.