Combining her interest in sustainability with her prowess behind the camera, Angelina Lee ’22 harvests a new documentary around permaculture
For her senior comps at TV, Angelina Lee ’22 made a 10-minute science fiction short titled , which is the genus name for the oak tree. The film is set in a not-so-distant future where there are no trees due to pollution and other environmental disasters, driving people to live in underground bunkers. Through advanced technology, they have a museum exhibit that’s so immersive that they can see what trees were like. “To these future people, trees are these really weird anomalies—these giants that can’t move but are alive,” Lee says.
“Part of the idea for having an exhibit that’s so photo-real and immersive meant that we could film outside,” adds the media arts and culture major, who employed the olive groves outside Keck Theater, a eucalyptus tree along the path to Fiji Hill, and a cluster of oaks on the Academic Quad among her locations.
Two years after screening Quercus, Lee returned to campus in April to premiere her first documentary—and while she has traded science fiction for science fact, the environment remains very much top of mind in her choice of subject matter. Financed by a $10,000 grant she received as a 2022 Obama Fellow, The Big Raise is a “poetic portrait,” in Lee’s words, of a small regenerative agriculture farm in France, where she lived and worked for nearly three months after graduating from TV.
The 15-acre property was purchased in 2017 by Alexis Rowell, a BBC journalist turned sustainability consultant and business developer. Responding to the all-too-real prospect that the Arctic ice caps would melt in his lifetime, Rowell and his partner, Blanche Lepetit, reimagined La Grande Raisandière (“The Big Raise”) as a permaculture farm and learning center to train people in new ways to grow nutritious food while actively repairing the soil. The farm incorporates sustainable components such as solar panels, rainwater capture, forest gardens, composting, and more.
During her time at Occidental, Lee developed an interest in permaculture—the idea of creating sustainable human habitats and food systems—and regenerative agriculture, a particular approach to farming that focuses on improving the soil and repurposing waste from one element as food for another. “France is leading the way in permaculture, especially Bec Hellouin Farm in Normandy, where they’ve done so much research,” Lee says.
Growing up in the Midwest, Lee watched countless films in high school and began thinking about movies critically. “At the same time, I was also really drawn to the visual image—I was taking pictures of everything,” she says. “For me, films were this amazing way to learn about the world and hear people’s stories.”
Lee thrived as a media arts and culture major and was selected as an Obama Fellow as a junior. “I was part of the fellowship seminar led by Associate Professor Ryan Preston-Roedder my senior year,” she says. “We read some amazing texts and had a lot of fascinating discussions about the public good and its many facets. And my peers—the two Obama Scholars, as well as the other fellows—were inspiring.
“When I came to TV, I knew that I wanted to study film because I would be in Los Angeles, so close to Hollywood and everything,” Lee adds. “But at the same time, I wanted to learn about sustainability—specifically looking for solutions that we can pursue to make the world a little better.”
She also got involved in a number of sustainability-related activities on campus: changing out compost bins, helping with TV Ecossentials, and doing public relations work for FEAST.
Lee was developing a project for the Obama Fellowship around the idea of permaculture when she reached out to a number of farms, including Rowell’s, “and Alexis was interested,” she says. What made it extra feasible was the fact that he already had a system of woofing, aka WWOOFing, in which volunteers provide farming and gardening assistance on rural farms in exchange for room and board. “That was what I had been hoping for, to be able to live on the farm as well, to get to know people better but also have more chances to film.”
Coming from a mostly suburban background, Lee arrived at the farm “expecting a rural situation with very few people,” she says, “and I was totally wrong. There were tons of people coming and going at the farm at all times—neighbors, friends, and people you knew from town. That was really wonderful as well.”
Over the course of The Big Raise, Lee methodically breaks down the different component parts of how the farm operates, right down to the disposal of the “pee and the poo,” as they call it. Lee shaped about 18 hours of raw footage down to an initial 50-minute edit, then finally down to its 40-minute runtime.
Since premiering at TV last April as part of Earth Month, The Big Raise has been making the festival circuit and was an official selection of the 17th Bushwick Film Festival in October. What does Rowell think of the finished film? “He said he liked the imagery,” Lee reports, “and that their cats, Thelma and Louis, are natural stars of the silver screen!”
In recent months, Lee has been in post-production on a feature-length environmental documentary, Making a Mini-Forest, about Europe’s mini-forest movement. After she finished filming at La Grande Raisandière, “I wanted to see Paris for the first time,” she recalls. A friend recommended to her Mini-Forest Revolution (2022), by nature and conservation writer Hannah Lewis, which covers the mini-forest movement around the world. “I was floored by how beautifully the book is written but also how this concept shares some affinities with permaculture, because microforests are doing a lot with a little bit of space.”
Subsequently, she contacted Boomforest, a Paris-based nonprofit association committed to creating natural spaces in urban spaces utilizing the very precise planting method developed by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki (more on him below). “I was interested in seeing their work,” Lee says, “and they invited me to one of their tree plantings in the suburbs of Paris. After being there for several hours, I was amazed by the electrifying energy that was there—the interest from volunteers who probably weren’t already specialists in tree planting.”
Lee came away from the planting with the seed of an idea for a larger documentary. “I knew from the book that there was a lot of this happening in Europe. So, I asked Boomforest, ‘Would you put me in contact with your friends who are doing this?’ And that started me on a journey of filming 10 different groups in Western Europe.”
From November 2022 to June 2023, Lee filmed in France, the U.K., Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. “It’s a story of the power of the individual,” she says. “One person sparked the imagination of another, and another, until a highly interconnected network of foresters emerged.”
Along the way, she asked Lewis to narrate the documentary “and she was interested,” Lee says. “I am so glad of that because she connected me to even more people.” After Lee returned to the United States, she traveled to Minnesota to meet Lewis, record her narration, and visit the mini-forest project underway in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood, a historically Black community whose residents had been given very little say in the construction and zoning happening there for decades. Lewis was working with area volunteers to plant a mini-forest at Pilgrim Baptist Church. “That project was amazing because it was bringing back native trees and shrubs in collaboration with the Rondo community,” Lee says.
Her final travels on the documentary took Lee to the Far East. “There’s a group in India that has been doing mini-forests for more than a decade,” she says. “They invited me to document a workshop they were doing in Indonesia. Then, unexpectedly, an environmentalist connected me to resources to help me go to Japan and film the start of the entire documentary, because the idea for these forests originates from the Miyawaki Method.”
Miyawaki (1928-2021) created the mini-forest, or microforest, concept in 1971—the same method utilized by Gretchen North, the John W. McMenamin Chair in Biology, and her students in developing a microforest on the Occidental campus last year. “I shed a lot of happy tears getting to see some of the original mini-forests,” Lee says.
After moving back to Los Angeles at the start of 2024, she commenced to editing The Big Raise. “In a weird way that was a blessing because I hadn’t seen the footage in so long,” Lee says. “It makes you a bit more objective in not just favoring the last shots that you made.
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“I was trying to embrace a more nontraditional approach to documentary,” she notes. “Even though the film has a lot of explanatory audio, I wanted to just show the seasons pass and hopefully offer a little bit of what it’s like to just be at that farm—to watch the tomatoes ripen and the plants evolve over time. I was emboldened very much by my media arts and culture professors who embrace trying new things, especially for documentary.”
In early December, Lee was preparing to travel to Saudi Arabia to premiere Making a Mini-Forest at the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (COP16) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. As The Big Raise continues to reach bigger audiences, she looks back fondly on her time working on the farm. “I came into it a little bit worried because I accidentally killed houseplants before and I didn’t want to mess up their operations,” she says with a laugh. “Thankfully, it was fine and it was really fun. Now, I have a better image of the garden that I’d like to plant one day.”
Top photo: Angelina Lee ’22 (photographed by Alexis Rowell, the subject of her documentary short) displays a crate of organic apples at La Grande Raisandière, a permaculture farm in France owned by Rowell and his partner.
