Exercises for Being Close to You is an experimental documentary that follows a group of hikers through Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The team is in search of the Porcupine Caribou herd in hopes of collecting stories that could help push back on oil exploration and drilling on the caribou’s birthing grounds. The narrator, admitting to a perverse desire to be close to everything, wants nothing more than to spoon a caribou. As the film culminates in anticipation of the “money shot”, the audience is pushed to evaluate its expectations of nature films. Meanwhile, the expedition team is left to weigh intention with strategy when environmental filmmaking mirrors tactics of the extraction economy they are fighting against. The film uses documentary footage of the two-week expedition intercut with experimental vignettes — exercises, to rethink our relationship to the land and animals we hope to protect.
