Joya Berrow and Lucy Jane are a documentary unity working as independent freelancers. National Geographic, Nowness, Vice, and other successful media platforms have featured their videos for the promotion of human welfare and contribution towards consciousness to protect environment.
Joya Berrow, a filmmaker and photographer, has measured a long way to Scotland to shoot his latest footage in which he explores the practice of Crofting. This traditional job is defined as a small-scale agricultural technique based around working communities who share and farm their land in common.
The author depicts an overwhelming beauty that goes hand in hand with everydayness of an arduous solitary job. This film has screened at Hebrides International Film Festival (2016), The London Short Film Festival (2017), Glasgow International Film Festival (2017), Take One Action Film Festival (2017).
Joya Berrow shoots a documentary film about a disappearing way of life on the Isle of Harris, outer Hebrides of Scotland, guided by a local crofter Donald John Maciness.
Crafting is a small-scale agricultural practice, specific to the Scottish highlands and islands. It has existed within the Gaelic culture since 19th century and continues today.
Scotland’s nature is a reputable lure for every soul. Joya unveils us a beautiful scenery of pure and untouched nature, its soft mountain shapes, calming undulation of water, screening of color shades on the clouds. Every glance is so ordinary and at the same time so rare, so precious. We see that nature lives independently on its own, it doesn’t need us. We long for its existence. Donald’s heritage of the occupation is a blessing as Isle of Harris is a place where he feels his blood circulating in the veins of the Ocean.
You always feel like I think that the land belongs to you. You feel its what your parents, your grandparents and everyone else has worked for that eventually is coming back to the people that worked and shaped the land.
You don’t have to dream about becoming a crofter but once you live with crofters it stays within your psyche so deep you have to hazard with the idea of becoming one. It chases you. The mountains are calling you home.
While you were young you seen what your parents were doing and other crofters around you learnt from them what did work and what did not work.
To be crofter means responsibility, passion, and friendship. Crofting is not a job, it’s a style of living, it’s devotion– you need to have it in your blood, you have to identify yourself with it. Animals, they are your soulmates. They are free in their naturalness, not separated from humans.
Crofting is gotta be in the blood to keep going. You have gotta want to do it to be able to survive doing it. They always say that grass is greener on the other side but I think the side I’m on is as green as you can get.
Watching this documentary is a real experience and we know whom to thank. The breathtaking camera shots are serene and long to let us absorb the views. Joya wants us to sense the atmosphere, to make us care about the environment and that’s what he truly does. We wish we could spend a day like Donald, or at least a couple of them. Because nature’s never the same, its beauty is inhomogenous.
Being out early in the morning and late at nights, see all the difference in the lights and how things change with the weather, it’s never the same from day to day.
Follow Joya Berrow on his Vimeo channel | Instagram | website.
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