The Soul of Nature (Drama) | A climate change microfilm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JtM47YQD38

Article by The AI Film Company

The Chair in the Flood

A woman sits alone in a forest, her chair half-submerged in rainwater. Around her, pine trunks stand like sentinels. The air feels heavy. You can almost hear the soaked earth breathe.

This image anchors The Soul of Nature, a short poetic film by Swiss filmmaker Christian Wenger, produced under Kohina Creative. The film began not as a script or a commission, but as a poem. It was written by Wenger’s mother, Veronika Herren, in her first book. She is seventy-nine, and her words carry the weight of memory and the fragility of age.

The poem reflects on the European floods of 2021. Whole towns were swept away. Lives collapsed overnight. The film returns to that loss not through spectacle, but through presence — one woman, sitting still, holding the gaze of a world that has changed.

People Made It

Wenger often speaks about how The Soul of Nature came together. There was no grand budget, no extended schedule. The team worked with what they had — a handful of collaborators, a few days, real weather. They built the set, styled the actor, and captured the sound themselves. Every decision was shaped by the people in the room.

Yet from the start, it was also a test of something new. AI was used as a creative partner, not a replacement. Certain environmental effects — the motion of clouds, the transition of seasons, the balance of color — were generated or enhanced using AI image models. But the performance remained untouched.

Wenger says, “AI helped us, but it didn’t make the film. People did.”

That sentence defines the spirit of the work. The tools served the story. They extended human hands, rather than erasing them.

The Poem and the Flood

The poem at the film’s heart is not political. It is quiet. It describes nature’s patience and humanity’s carelessness. It sees water not as punishment but as proof — proof that the world will reclaim itself when balance is broken.

This gives the film its emotional core. We are not looking at climate change from above, through graphs and policies, but from within — through a mother’s language and a son’s lens.

There is something profoundly cyclical in that relationship. The mother writes about a wounded earth. The son turns those words into moving light. And the process itself becomes a metaphor for care: how we pass stories, how we listen, how we rebuild meaning from loss.

Real Light, Artificial Time

The production itself mirrored this tension between the real and the artificial. The shoot took place in real daylight, on location, with limited resources. Every shot was planned like a painting. The challenge was time. The story moves through seasons, yet they only had a week to film.

Instead of surrendering the vision, Wenger’s team turned to AI to extend time. Using early versions of models like Seedream and Nano Banana, they altered environmental cues — adding fog, shifting the tone of the sky, letting the forest seem to change mood and temperature.

This wasn’t post-trickery. It was closer to what painters call glazing: layering meaning on top of reality. The human base remained visible beneath.

AI acted as the tool that allowed the crew to finish what they could not physically achieve — not to replace labor, but to give continuity to the human intent that started the frame.

The Soul of Nature as Method

Seen in that way, The Soul of Nature is more than a short film. It’s a study in method. It shows how small teams can make emotionally large work by understanding where technology fits in the creative chain.

AI is not treated as a spectacle. It’s used as an extension of cinematography. Just as early filmmakers learned to control exposure or color timing, this new generation is learning to control models and prompts.

Each output becomes a brushstroke. Each edit becomes a question of authorship.

Wenger’s practice sits between these states — the human and the algorithmic — without losing his footing in either. That balance is rare. Many AI experiments fall into one of two traps: technical novelty without soul, or romantic humanism without scalability. The Soul of Nature avoids both by grounding itself in care.

A Mother and a Machine

There’s a quiet symbolism in the fact that Wenger’s mother is the source of this story. She represents a lineage — not just familial, but creative. Her words come from a time before datasets and diffusion models. They are instinctive, embodied, analog.

By interpreting them through AI tools, Wenger doesn’t distort them. He translates them for a new era. The film becomes an act of preservation through transformation.

This approach mirrors the larger environmental theme of the work. Just as the earth must adapt without losing its core, human creativity must evolve without abandoning its authorship.

That is the moral tension beneath the image of a woman seated in water. She remains calm as the world changes around her. She embodies both the fragility of nature and the resilience of humanity.