IT IS HARD TO LEAVE SENSE UNMADE is about the rewilding a pair macro and micro ecologies: the Swiss Alps, through the introduction of Eastern European lynx, and the my intestines, through the introduction of bacteria produced with an ancient Mayan ferment, using the Nopal cactus growing on the US-Mexico border. These ‘transformer species’ both re-stabilize their respective ecosystems by re-balancing species diversity and enabling healthier systems.

The film connects the story of these two sites by my personal story: the lynx were translocated from Eastern Europe the same year my father was released from the USSR, and denied refugee status in Europe. He ultimately settled in the US, where I was born and inherited his gut difficulties. I rewild my insides with a biotechnology developed by the Mayans from a cactus growing in the desert lands of the US-Mexico border that controls human migration. 

The same automated imaging technologies deployed in the Swiss forests to monitor the lynx and ensure their survival are deployed at the US-Mexican border to monitor and exclude humans attempting to migrate. The machine’s eye - automated in deserts and forests, microscopic traveling through my gut, and pattern-matching in models built by scientists looking for ecological interactions, make up the film’s visuals. Along the way we ask questions about the kind of knowledge, and what kind of wild, these tools enable. How do they reinforce existing power structures or enforce new ones? 

The film asks what is the evolving meaning of ‘wildness’ in a post-colonial world marked by environmental destruction and unequal economic growth? How is rewilding and “wildness” tied to ecological and human health, and to human attempts to understand and control our world? How can it serve healing and liberatory purposes? What if the wild is home? A home we live inside, and that lives inside us? 

Through this personal investigation of inner and outer ecosystem rewilding, the film explores seemingly disparate issues of our time - rewilding, migration, the deployment of technology in nature - demonstrating their interconnectedness and political ecology.