Earth Day 2025: A New Film by Modron & Coal Poet

For Earth Day 2025, we are releasing a new film funded by the Books Council of Wales, New Audiences 2024. The Dunes, written by Kristian Evans, and filmed by Nathan Roach, explores the perspective of a teenage, neurodivergent, working-class runaway, seeking refuge and sanctuary from a normative society in the seemingly desolate dunelands of the Glamorgan coast. These dunes, until very recently, have been a disregarded and remote place, considered by all but a few enthusiasts to be little more than wasteland.

Kristian is a founding editor of Modron. His publications include Unleaving (Happenstance) and Otherworlds (Broken Sleep), and he was co-editor of 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren). He was shortlisted for the 2024 Michael Marks Environmental Poets of the Year for Where Moly Grows, and he has been a guest editor at Magma Poetry.

Nathan, born and based in south Wales, is a freelance photographer/videographer who specialises in Event/Documentary, founding Coal Poet Media in early 2017. Nathan has worked with clients including Glastonbury Festival, The Labour Party and Live Nation. He has produced music videos for bands such as Those Damn Crows, Giolì & Assia, Helldown, and Chaos Reigns.

In The Dunes we are shown a variety of striking images of the place itself, accompanied by the voice of the narrator, considering, through a series of poetic reflections, how this little known ‘edgeland’ came to be a site of discovery and realisation for a marginalised person. We can’t possess a place, the film suggests, but perhaps place can possess us.

The Dunes explores the extent to which place and imagination reflect and inform each other, under a realisation of the deepening complexities of our desire to belong, in an age of increasing economic inequality, insecurity and ecological crisis.

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