Date and Time

Starts: October 17, 2026
2pm
Ends: October 17, 2026
6pm

Meeting Point

Churchill Gardens, London SW1V 3AL, UK

About This Event

A pop-up festival of live-action and animation films with their makers and causes from urban green spaces. Docs and shorts about nature and greening activities from personal stories and nature conservation to urban gardening, outdoor wellbeing, and campaigning. Through rare film screenings and thought-provoking talks, we explore these themes through the eyes of filmmakers and the everyday heroes of the city’s green spaces. Our work lies at the intersection of cities, filmmaking, and nature.

Film programme:

Paradise for Who
Jackie Turner
2.05pm – 2.30pm
A community garden in London sits in the shadow of an imposing Victorian prison, and the film charts its history and hopes for the future.

Plant Community
Samuel Joseph Phelps, Jemima Daisy Priest
2.30pm – 2.55pm
A vignette of the quietly unassuming but busy urban gardener, in which four individuals see guerrilla gardening through their own lens, from calming the mind to healing bodies and feeding communities.

Bollywood Badmarshes Go Bush
Susie Vickery
2.55pm – 3.10pm
Inspired by Bollywood action films and Indian miniature painting, this tale sees Western Australia’s endangered animals reach out to Bollywood miscreants for help against environmental destruction.

The Leaves of London
Joshua Geer
3.10pm – 3.30pm
A short documentary exploring the emotional relationships people form with urban trees, told through four intimate stories, each centred on a single tree and the person who returns to it.

Earthly
Anna de Rijk
3.30pm – 3.45pm
Follows a group of female farmers at the organic farm Perkuus on the edge of Brussels, whose calm, repetitive work contrasts with the city as they seek gentler ways of working the land during a very dry season.

Nature Is Gayer Than You Think
Jamy Silver
3.45pm – 4.00pm
Examines what “natural” really means when it is used to judge sexuality, gender roles and family structure, and finds that nature is far queerer than expected.

If I Eat You Will We Both Still Be OK? (Plant)
Rhona Eve Clews
4.00pm – 4.20pm
Shot while crawling across a Cornish field with a macro lens, the film journeys through plant stories, working-class autobiography, colonial botanies and more-than-human entanglement.

Nature Ain’t a Luxury
Louis Butler
4.20pm – 4.30pm
Description awaiting confirmation from Mark.

Interbeing
Lily Plester
4.30pm – 4.40pm
An experimental short visualising the hidden activity of the mycorrhizal network, combining cinematography, data-driven animation and a soundtrack made from MIDI data and EMF frequencies collected from plants and fungi.

Rock Dove.
Ryan Powell
4.40pm – 5.00pm
Follows a group of London volunteers who meet on Sundays to catch pigeons and carefully remove string and hair from their feet, an act of care across the species divide.

Touch Some Soil
Erika Lau
5.00pm – 5.10pm
An urban farmer at a community farm teaches us to slow down, exploring South Asian growing, cultural memory, collective care and food justice in the city.

Becoming Wild
Jane Pittman
5.10pm – 6.00pm
In a Virginia neighbourhood changed by gentrification and loss of green space, a backyard becomes a sanctuary for wildlife, showing how beauty survives when we nurture it.

The Hispering
Sally Payne
6.00pm – 6.15pm
A sequence of prose-poem-like glimpses between dream, waking and storytelling, taking in meadows, oceans, fairytales and unseen creatures, about how the world speaks to us if we listen.

Insolito
Ralf Berkus, Ulrike Berkus
6.15pm – 6.45pm
An apparently ordinary quarry lake near Karlsruhe in southern Germany is home to turtles, rare freshwater shrimp, bizarre microorganisms and predatory fish with fearsome teeth.

The Nature of Nature
Laura Leigh deNey
6.45pm – 7.20pm
An ode to the variety of life in the Hudson Valley, from high-elevation forests to the globally rare tidal marshes of the Hudson estuary.

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About London National Park City Festival
Saturday 17 October

A day of walks, talks, workshops and community – celebrating the people working to connect Londoners with local nature. Visit our Festival page for all the information you need! 

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How do tickets work?

  1. Buy a festival ticket here – £5 early bird · Kids go free.
  2. Add on any walk, workshop, or film festival ticket now or later.
  3. Arrive at Churchill Gardens Estate on October 17 and enjoy!

Individual walks are an add-on to your London National Park City Festival ticket. To attend a session, you will need a general admission festival ticket, plus a ticket for this session. Both are available here – grab yours, and we will see you there!

For the full festival ticket page please visit Our Festival Ticket Page

How to Book this Event

This is how you can sign up or register for this event

If this is a walk or tour: the total distance of this walk in miles:

No information available

This event is suitable for the follow audiences:

Suitability not verified by organiser, at users own discretion

This event capacity is:

100

Ticket information for this event

£7.50
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