A film by Matthew Burdis, written by Rachel Chanter, narrated by Claire Rodgerson, original score by Barry Hyde.
Hinter: An Apocalypse is a film rooted in the history, both recent and ancient, of the area surrounding Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. Questioning the nature of enclosure and land ownership, the piece traces a common thread of self-destruction from the colonial project, stretching back to the Roman Empire, to the acts of ecological vandalism which take place on both large and small scales in the present day.
The filmmakers walked the stretch of Hadrian’s Wall between Milecastle 39 and Crag Lough, where the famous Sycamore Gap tree stood, just four days before it was cut down with a chainsaw on the night of September 27th 2023. The felling of the tree made nationwide news and opened up a conversation about the nature of the crime that had been committed, raising issues of ownership, ecocide, and the legal status of the natural world.
Hinter is shot using primarily infrared and thermal cameras in low light at various locations along Hadrian’s Wall, from Bowness-on-Solway in Cumbria, to Wallsend, North Tyneside. Infrared is widely used in surveillance and night recording, detecting details invisible to the human eye and feeding familiar sights back to us in strange lunar landscapes. This technology was chosen for Hinter as a way to engage the viewer with different ways of searching, looking, and uncovering, whilst simultaneously transforming the landscape, revealing an otherworldly terrain.
Seeking to encapsulate this quiet landscape that is at the same time a teeming repository of stories, violence, politics, and existential lessons, Hinter functions as both an elegy for an ancient tree and a protest against human rapaciousness and abuse of power.
This work is supported by The Eaton Fund.
Hinter: An Apocalypse | 2026 | Trailer
