THIRTEEN WAYS
ABOUT
What happens when you encounter a piece of land you have never seen before; what do you see, think, and feel? This film explores the human relationship to the natural world through an experimental structure: one-by-one, a series of scientists, hunters, paragliders, artists, and naturalists are brought to a small patch of field & forest in midcoast Maine, and left to wander freely. Filmed in all four seasons and featuring naturalist Bernd Heinrich, glaciologist Kirsty Tinto, tracker Dorcas Miller and others, this film is a celebration of place, an exploration of seeing, and a new approach to depicting science on screen.
Director Ian Cheney is an Emmy-nominated & Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. He has completed ten feature documentaries, including King Corn (2007), The Greening of Southie (2008), The City Dark (2011), The Search for General Tso (2014), Bluespace (2015), The Most Unknown (2018), The Emoji Story (2019), Thirteen Ways (2019), Picture a Scientist (2020) and The Long Coast (2020). He received bachelor’s & master’s degrees from Yale University, and an MFA in Film from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A former MacDowell Fellow & Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, he lives in Maine.