All living things on Earth return, in the end, to the land — and the land remembers everything that ever lived upon it. The nine films of this year's Nature section listen to the stories the land remembers.

The first to be heard are the climate alarms sounding from Svalbard and Greenland. Frost Without Snow and Ice follows Frost, a mother polar bear raising her cubs over ten years in Svalbard, the fastest-warming place on Earth, while JASON'S BOX accompanies a climate scientist who, convinced that data alone is not enough, plants trees with his own hands on ground laid bare by Greenland's melting ice. Together they stand as evidence.

Films that turn their gaze to change and resistance within nature follow. The Lama's Son contemplates the quiet unraveling of high-Himalayan society through a lama's lineage left without an heir, his son now a sushi chef in New York. Fémene brings together Italian women of different generations in the mountains to exchange the experiences of their lives. And White Snow, the section's sole fiction film, portrays a mother's quiet resistance as she crosses the mountains with her yak, an old television on her back, to bring her son's banned film to its audience.

"Nature: The Land Remember" draws out the memories etched into the land, one by one. The Tales of the Tale honors the survival and sacrifice of miners through oral tales drifting among abandoned pits; the animation Polliwog gently links a tadpole's metamorphosis to a young girl's coming of age; SOIL stays with a man who keeps his ground alone in a village vanishing to coal mining; and Long Way to the Pasture follows a nomadic family's journey toward the summer pastures of Kyrgyzstan. After the films, an invitation awaits: to add your own story to the many memories of the land.

― Jinna Lee, Programmer​