The documentary Sanctuary Station is a meditative look at the world of women and youth who have built deep relationships with the coastal redwood forest of northwestern California and feel called to defend it from logging. As they describe their connections with the forest, the film delves into the idea of what it means to connect with nature and build a reciprocal relationship with other lifeforms. 

Artist and filmmaker Brigid McCaffrey shot the entire documentary on 16 mm black-and-white film over six years, between 2016 and 2022. Unlike high-definition video, the black-and-white imagery foregrounds shadows, obscuring detail—an effect that mimics the “reclusive hiding” and “impenetrability” of the forest, she explains. “While it was very hard to shoot in the forest in black and white… I thought it spoke to some of the themes of the film.”

The film, too, is multilayered, evolving, and calming. There is no central narrator, nor is the audience presented with the names of those featured as they speak and appear on screen. Instead, the film is anchored by the poetry of Mary Norbert Kӧrte, a former Catholic nun who became a poet and peace activist in the 1960s. She eventually made her home on a piece of land known to locals as Sanctuary Station near Mendocino, in northern California, and fought to save the redwoods before she died in 2022.

Kӧrte’s warm and powerful recitations of her poems are at the heart of film. The viewer is nudged to observe and connect to the poems and stories they hear as they take in artistically shot scenes emphasizing the light, shadows, and textures in the forest, on the nearby coast, and in everyday spaces where the subjects spend their time. 

“I’m really interested in bringing the viewer in to have their own experience in the cinema,” says McCaffrey, whose films have been presented around the world, from London’s Whitechapel Gallery to the New York Film Festival. Much of her work focuses on exploring how people relate to and coexist with landscapes. 

The vignettes in Sanctuary Station are reflective and diverse. We meet women of different generations and backgrounds doing varied activities—from walking in the woods, marching in an anti-logging protest on a road alongside the forest, or nurturing goats, to harvesting cannabis, dancing in nature, or performing acrobatics near a playground with the forest in the distance.

When dealing with these invasive plants, what we’re really dealing with is broken culture.

An Indigenous woman who felt a calling to fight for her ancestral land reconnects with her ancestors’ tradition of gathering acorns from oak trees. “It was a place that gave life, that provided food, that provided life for my ancestors,” she says. 

Later, she states “I feel as though if we gather the acorns and activate the space again, that maybe we can establish that relationship between us and the earth.” 

Another woman speaks about gorse, a “very dense and thorny” evergreen shrub transplanted to North America by Cornish settlers who, she says, used it for thatch, fuelling bread ovens, medicine, sacred fires, and more. Now, it’s taken over the landscape pictured on screen.

“When dealing with these invasive plants, what we’re really dealing with is broken culture,” the woman reflects, as sheep munch on gorse leaves and flowers. “You know, you have something that can take care of you if you take care of it, but then when you don’t, it will cover everything and make life impossible to sustain.”

Those featured in the film are sustained in some way by the redwood forest. It is a sanctuary, a sacred space. One woman who moved to the region in search of solitude speaks about how the trees give life to mycorrhizal fungi, and how in return the fungi help sustain them. Another woman reflects on how, since protesting out of anger at loggers in the ’80s, she’s come to see trees as a model of unconditional giving. “The very act of planting a tree is a commitment to the future,” she says.

The potential loss of the redwoods looms over the film. Kӧrte recites poems reflecting on her decision to become a reclusive poet in the forest and the significance of the land. “I am always conscious of the fact that they let me stay here. They allow,” she says of the trees, towards the end of the film. “And how can I not speak for them when they’ve done so much for me?”

---

Vancouver’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival runs from May 1–11, 2025. Sanctuary Station (69 min) screens on May 9 at 6 pm at The Cinematheque. Tickets are available on the DOXA website.

This story was first published on The Green House, our membership platform. Join us there for early access, discounts and freebies, community discussions, and to support our work telling the large and small stories of how we can live sustainably.