Independent Lens
True Conviction
Exonerated ex-prisoners who started a detective agency work to rebuild their lives and fix the criminal justice system.
Shifted Landscapes
Shifted Landscapes presents a mosaic of stories depicting the environmental, cultural, and psychological landscapes of California amidst the ongoing climate crisis.
- Length
- 90 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Open Call
Director
Jamie Meltzer
Jamie Meltzer is a documentary filmmaker and professor in the MFA Program in Documentary Film at Stanford University. His award-winning documentaries have screened at Berlinale, Hot Docs, SXSW, and Tribeca, broadcast on PBS and as New York Times Op-Docs, and supported by the Sundance Institute, MacArthur Foundation, and ITVS.
- Other ITVS Films
- Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story
- True Conviction
Producer
Annie Marr
Annie Marr is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker. Her produced and directed works have screened at IDFA, Tribeca, SXSW, AFI Fest, Camden, Big Sky, the United Nations, and on the New York Times Op-Docs channel. She is a 2024 SFFILM FilmHouse Resident and holds an MFA from Stanford University in Documentary Film.
We fund untold stories for public media.
Learn more about funding opportunities with ITVS.
The Film
Shifted Landscapes illuminates the pervasive impact of the climate crisis on California through an array of stories. In Monterey, a group of volunteer divers and marine biologists smash invasive purple urchins with hammers in an attempt to save the kelp population, already decimated by warming waters. A scientist works to spare a forest from infestations of bark beetles by using their unique and eerie sounds against them. A fire lookout monitors the Sequoia National Forest, while in the Sierras, a group of morel foragers looks for the season’s harvest amidst the leftover debris of the fire season. The town of Pajaro, home to mostly farmworkers, struggles to understand how their area was flooded, while adjacent wealthier communities remained dry and unscathed.
The documentary combines rich sound design with meditative, slow takes to embed viewers in these shifting spaces, communities, and landscapes. Intertwined vignettes depict the smaller and larger environmental changes occurring across California, bringing to light the processes that are shaping the environment and altering lives.
