Love Notes to Nature: a tiny film
Winner of Best Film, BMC Women in Adventure film awards 2025
Back in June 2025, Joanna Suchomska*, a film-maker from Brighton approached me to make a little film with me, featuring my writing which had inspired her, as part of Sheffield Doc Fest filmmaker challenge. It was one of those moments when my gut instinct took over. I said yes, not really knowing what I was getting myself into.
A week later, on a way-too-hot day, Joanna and her little film crew spent a day filming and interviewing me on my allotment, and along Stanage Edge in the Peak District. We shared a beautiful day full of respect, creativity, care, camaraderie, laughter and sweat.
Later that week, when it’d all been edited by Joanna, the film was screened at my local indie cinema. I felt weird watching myself on the big screen flouncing around my allotment and Stanage Edge in a flouncy blouse totally unsuitable for allotmenting and rambling. Yet the message felt important. Joanna had made beautiful work and honoured my words, my story. After the showing several women came up to me and repeated one line from the film to me, ‘what if women made maps?’.
***
Last weekend Joanna and I were reunited at Kendal Mountain Festival for the British Mountaineering Council’s Women in Adventure Film Awards 2025. I arrived not even realising that this was an award ceremony! And with profound sadness in my heart. My close friend Kim Scott loved the allotment. Alongside her ex-partner and close friend Byron Allison, she had planted sunflowers that were probably visible from the moon. And sweet peas. Garlic. Kale. Tomatoes. Borage. Sweetcorn. Onions. Flowers.
Kim *loved* to grow flowers. She even wore flowery-flouncy blouses too whilst planting on the allotment. Both Kim and Byron kept the allotment going whilst I recovered from my head injury. I doubt I’d still have the allotment if it weren’t for their green fingered solidarity. They are part of the land, part of this soil. Part of the allotment story. Forever.
Sadly, Byron passed away this April. And then my beloved friend Kim passed away suddenly in late September. Rest in power and peace. I love you 💚
from left to right: Kim 💚 | Kim's first sunflower | Kim's very tall sunflowers 2022 | flower planting request to Kim
Somehow, amongst all the adventurous women adventurers screened – women descending cave systems, skateboarding through mountains, running across the alps, co-designing the first outdoor hijab with Berghaus – our gentle little film was awarded the Best Film in the BMC Women in Adventure film awards 2025. I’m still in shock.
I think Kim would've loved the film. Kim was a women of her own-kind-of-adventure too. She lived as boldly, brightly and as tall as those sunflowers visible from the moon.
I don’t chase accolades or awards or give them too much attention. Yet this one means something to me. Back in the late 90’s and noughties I was actively involved in outdoor activities, adventuring on hill tops and on rivers, abseiling, climbing, sailing, wild camping, coast-steering, kayaking, hiking – alongside fellow black and brown women (we’ve always been out there in those hills!) – often guided by unforgettable Pammy Johal, a pioneering powerhouse of an outdoor education leader and mountaineer. These experiences opened my world to the outdoors, to nature and secured my sense of ‘I belong here’.
However. I struggled with the physicality of a lot of the activities. I believed that these were my access points in to nature and the outdoors, how I needed to be. Yet I kept getting injured, had to be tied to leaders on steep ridges because of vertigo, had little upper body strength to pull myself up over ledges. I began to hate climbing. I’d get dehydrated or heat stroke or too cold or exhausted quickly. Broke out in strange rashes! Fell down hills. Misread OS maps. I was the bedraggled one at the end with a red face. If some disaster was going to happen to someone, it was likely going to happen to me.
I did have some talents though. I was great at body jamming up crevices, abseiling down slopes and jumping off high piers into the sea without hesitation. I even went through the Cheesepress down Long Churn cave. Never again. I loved a zip-line, just hang there and zoom off. Eventually, a week long course in rock climbing at Plas Y Brenin finished me off. I felt crap at this kind of outdoorsy stuff that needed too much clinky gear and goretex. This wasn’t me. I just wanted to sit on a hillside, stare at the view and eat a cheese and pickle sandwich.
***
Over the years that followed I found my own gentle, quiet, slow ways of being in the wild. And also found my understanding of how and why nature is so important to me, and how I am nature. We all are.
This is what this little film celebrates and why this award feels so special. A recognition that adventure can be gentle, living longtime in our bones, living in our back gardens, on our doorsteps. Transgenerationally. Ancestrally. Slowly. Gory-tex free. We simply need to get quiet enough to feel this.
Adventure on your own terms. In a flouncy-flowery blouse. On a hillside. Eating a cheese and pickle sandwich.
I hope you enjoy watching this film.
About the filmmaker: Joanna Suchomska
Joanna Suchomska is a Polish-born documentary filmmaker based in Brighton. MATKA / POLKA (2022), her lyrical documentary exposing Poland’s hidden abortion stories, received numerous international festival accolades and won Best Documentary at Women X Festival (UK). Joanna’s upcoming film, Call Me If You’re Lost, explores displacement, gender-based violence, and the vulnerabilities of being a young woman online through the eyes of an activist. The film was selected for the East-West Talent Lab industry pitch at goEast Festival 2024. In her work, shaped by her identity as an immigrant, she is drawn to themes of belonging, memory, taboo and the female experience. (Sheffield Doc Fest website)
