Possible Landscapes

(2025, 105 mins, Trinidad & Tobago / United States)

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 through 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 allows questions of labour, migration and environmental change to emerge through observation and lived experience.