Darlington's Dedicated Live Music Venue & Studios
Film screening and discussion, part of the Reimagining Regional Policy Through Creative Engagement exhibition
The Land Remembers (2025)
Directed by Azadeh Fatehrad
Produced by Northern Heartlands
In the Veins (2025)
Directed by Ben Lamb
Produced by Yorkshire & North East Film Archive
The Land Remembers (2025)
The Land Remembers is a place-based portrait of High Nature Value (HNV) farming in the uplands. Through seasonal rhythms and everyday practices — light winter grazing, late hay cuts, hand tools such as the scythe — the film presents biodiversity as a living presence: orchids, red campion, globeflower, curlew, nuthatch.
Set within a mosaic of hay meadows, hedgerows, and stone walls, the film honours traditional land management shaped by timing, stewardship windows, and intergenerational knowledge. Ecological care unfolds in pauses for nesting birds, the cut–lie–remove logic of soil health, and peatland re-wetting to retain water and carbon.
Social and cultural life are equally central: kitchen tables, darts nights, women’s often-unseen “domestic ecologies,” and shared workshops that bring long-time farmers and newcomers together.
At a moment of rapid environmental and economic change, the film presents upland farming as a living climate–nature solution — safeguarding habitats, water quality, and carbon — while acknowledging real pressures, from shifting policies to labour shortages and housing demand. By translating policy into lived scenes, The Land Remembers offers a grounded model of resilience rooted in place.
The film was made as part of Creatively Connected, a creative arts programme led by the North Pennines National Landscape team in partnership with the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority through the Tees-Swale: naturally connected programme. It was made possible with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and supported by Arts Council England. Creatively Connected is produced by Northern Heartlands.
In the Veins (2025)
“In the Veins” is a short film that resonates across generations, drawing on over a century of archive footage to illuminate the mining heritage of Yorkshire and the North East of England.
“Some people have blood running through their veins, I think we’ve got coal dust!” – Miner’s daughter
More than a history lesson, the film is an emotional journey through hardship and hope, division and defiance, perseverance and pride. For centuries, mining communities built livelihoods, identities, and collective strength around coal. The devastating decline of the industry, culminating in one of the longest industrial disputes of the twentieth century, left lasting social and economic impacts that are still felt today.
From the growth of mining villages and the solidarity forged underground, to activist movements such as Women Against Pit Closures, In the Veins reflects on both the prosperity and the loss embedded in this history. At a time of climate urgency, it also prompts reflection on what a “just transition” from fossil fuels to cleaner energy might mean for communities shaped by extraction.
Commissioned by Teesside University with support from the AHRC Impact Acceleration Account, and produced by the Yorkshire and North East Film Archive, the film serves as a catalyst for dialogue — learning from the past to help shape the future.
