Super Nature Slow Travel

In the depths of Winter 2026, the team behind UK feature doc Super Nature took the slow travel route to Gothenburg Film Festival. Producer Rebecca Wolff describes the trip.

"In the depths of Winter 2026, myself and Ed Sayers - director/producer and editor of our documentary Super Nature which I produced with him and Beth Allan of Forest of Black, met early one January morning to start our overland journey to our International Premiere, in competition, at Gothenburg Film Festival. It seemed like the rain hadn’t stopped for weeks and I was excited to see what lay on the other side of that Eurostar tunnel.

To give you a little context for why we were trying to travel the slow, greener way our documentary was made with as little travel as possible. Our film is a love letter to nature, told by people all over the world entirely on Super 8. The filmmaking process was an amazing journey in collaboration, we wanted people to tell the stories of their connection to nature where they are and as we wanted to shoot on Super 8, the original home movie format, we set up a production process where our core team didn’t travel internationally to oversee these shoots. So throughout production we travelled only by video calls, emails, whats-app groups, we sent small packages of camera and film, sometimes by courier, sometimes with someone else who was travelling anyway, sometimes we created beautiful daisy chains of filmmakers who finished their story and then were travelling back/to somewhere else and took our kit along with them. Eventually all footage winged its way back to our incredible partner Cinelab Film + Digital before the rushes scans landed and Ed would start to edit the scenes, and eventually weave them into the tapestry of the whole film. We collaborated with amazing people, and many we have still not met in person, but have formed amazing creative connections with, through the creation of this film.

Prior to our Gothenburg trip, Super Nature had World Premiered at BFI London Film Festival which was amazing as London, where both Ed and I live, was the hub from which this film all began. It was our first chance to meet some of our filmmaker contributors who lived in the UK, France and Portugal and share the world premiere experience with them.

We knew the next step of the journey would require a gear change in terms of our approach to travel. Although our production process negated the need for much travel, we felt that it was important that we would engage with and present the film for the international premiere, and that Ed would then continue on, with myself or our other producer joining at other key moments for the film along the way. We wanted to do this travel with an eye always on the cost/benefit calculation of the travel and look to travel in the greenest ways we could, practically..

Gothenburg Film Festival were very supportive of us travelling this way and paid Ed’s way to get to the festival by train while I turned to British Council for support for my travel. They give enhanced support for sustainable travel, in recognition of it being a more expensive way to travel, and the extra support needed in order to encourage more sustainable choices.

We boarded the train, armed a small selection of Ed’s analogue cameras (Super 8 being one of them), our flasks of coffee and my mad boxes of salad and veg that I’d emptied the contents of my fridge into, to eat along the way.

At Brussels-Midi we were greeted by the very welcome feeling of sun on our faces! We had about an hour till our next train that would take us to Koln so we went in search of food and found a delicious little proper tapas bar. We sat in the sun feeling pretty happy with our choices and eating a selection of delicious food

[Picture].

Back at the station we were greeted with the less welcome vision of our train having been cancelled. It turned out that an unexploded WW2 bomb, 250kg in size had been discovered in Aachen a town in Germany near the borders with Belgium and Netherlands and so the whole town had to be evacuated while the bomb was defused. This meant instead of going:

Brussels - Koln - Hamburg

We were now going to be going:

Brussels - Liege - Koln - Hanover - Hamburg

Our journey had certainly just got more complicated but also perhaps more memorable. My biggest joy of this diversion was discovering the beautiful architecture of the station and town of Liege, which I peeked out to as we waited for our next train. It’s a place I probably would never have seen or gone to if it wasn’t for this and for me it felt like a rare pearl tucked away in the countryside. The train from Koln to Hanover was less fun. Because of all the disruptions Ed and I found ourselves sitting on the floor of the carriage near the luggage racks. BUT I had the most delicious warm, pumpkin seed covered pretzel in hand which nearly made up for the discomfort

At Hanover we had a quick dinner in the station and then arrived in a freezing cold Hamburg at around 10pm that night where we were stopping over for the night, only now a couple of hours later than planned.

The next day after a hearty hotel breakfast and helpful hotel staff who filled our flasks with fresh made coffee and oat milk we set out into the crisp, cold morning on our journey onto Sweden.

The day passed without incident as we wound our way to Copenhagen, passing beautiful snow-covered countryside, glinting in the sun. At Copenhagen we had a short stopover and then boarded our final train to Gothenburg. The trains were really comfortable, with fantastic wifi which meant you could actually work while you travelled and a cute little retro restaurant car which made me feel like I was in the 1970s.

In Gothenburg we found even colder air but a very warm welcome from the festival staff and managed to find one of the most delicious vegan pizzas I’ve had.

Sharing the film to audiences in Sweden was amazing, beautiful venues, really engaged audiences and we discovered that they’re a culture that already think deeply about how they travel. We got a big cheer from the audience when we said we had come by train and discovered that in Sweden they have two sayings relating to this:

Flygskam - Flight shame / Tågskryt - Train brag

It shows how the thinking has permeated their culture about what we can do to make small differences in our daily lives and how every choice we make can affect change in our world, and I think that’s a very empowering thing to feel.

After a really lovely festival and wonderful Q&As with audiences who really felt like they got the heart and soul of the film, it was time to journey home. We were going to try the sleeper train from Malmo where we had a few hours to kill. My sister-in-law who is Swedish had recommended a sauna there to me which looks straight out of a Wes Anderson film. It’s a beautiful old badhuset and we went there, plunging into the black ice cold Baltic sea out of a steaming hot sauna that looked out across the water.

[Picture here]

We then went for quite a traditional warming meal before boarding the sleeper train to Hamburg. We had opted for a mixed person shared couchette. We had two very nice compartment companions, one headed to Berlin to start his university studies and the other headed to Hamburg to play professional football. Ed and the other two guys were stacked on bunks like some layered cake… I can’t say it was the best sleep I’ve ever had and perhaps next time I might opt for a single compartment though the cost is quite prohibitive for those. I did sleep though and it meant that we had done half of our journey while sleeping which felt efficient.

In Hamburg we installed ourselves for a long breakfast near the station before heading on to Koln and then from there, on to Brussels to catch the Eurostar home - this time no WW2 unexploded bombs, or delays held us up but it also sadly passed without further pretzels.

Reflecting on this slower, more sustainable way of travel I’m really glad that we went that way, and days later we also travelled to Berlin this way to the Cinema For Peace Awards, where we were nominated and took part in a World Forum on a panel which was a Council For the Environment and another panel about Ecocide laws called How To Stop Climate Change For Real.

We can’t always travel in the greenest way possible. It’s expensive, and takes a long time. I do think the slower way of travel forms memories in the way that flying doesn’t. I will remember the journey as much as the destination in a way I never would if I had flown. You see places you never would have seen otherwise and probably experience things you wouldn’t have otherwise, also as a benefit you find yourself in the centre of a city when you arrive rather than an hour outside of it.

I think there are big structural things that need to change in order to help people be able to travel more sustainably, the first being cost. I don’t think we should have a situation where it’s more expensive to travel by train than it is to fly. It’s also about working with festivals to change the culture of the travel that they offer as standard (air travel). We’ve actually found festivals incredibly supportive of travelling in this way when we explain why we’re trying to do it but I would love to see train travel offered as standard as an option so it’s not on the filmmakers to propose it.

I am also really aware that it’s not always possible for filmmakers to travel in this way, it takes up more time and if the festival isn’t covering your costs, it’s more costly too. I am excited to see more and more sleeper routes opening up across Europe. By September on European Sleeper it will be possible to get from Brussels to Milan on one sleeper.

It’s not always even going to be possible to travel by train on this film’s tour, we have just had screenings in Lithuania and Sofia, it wasn’t practical to travel there by train as it would have taken so long but we tried to minimise flights by working with the two festivals so that Ed stayed a little longer in Lithuania and then travelled on from there to Sofia, first by coach to Warsaw and then a flight from there, this meant that instead of 4 flights he was taking 3. So we’re acting consciously with whatever travel decisions we make, even looking at ways to travel across the Atlantic without flying…we can keep you posted on how that goes!! As the film’s tour continues we plan to engage more of our filmmaking collaborators to go and represent the film in their countries. And when we release the film in the UK and Ireland in the Autumn with BFI Distribution we are exploring how the Q&A tour can be done in the most sustainable way, so don’t be surprised if you see Ed rock up on his bike to some of the screenings! "