A girl flings fish from a white bucket to a flock of hungry gulls. A boy on wooden stilts ambles past a red house crowned in clouds. A group of teens leaps into the ocean, their shoulders lit pink by the setting sun.
The 12 tableaux comprising Windward, Sharon Lockhart’s new documentary that premiered at the New York Film Festival, beseech us to be slowly beguiled. Depicting the rugged terrain of Newfoundland’s Fogo Island, where Lockhart spent three summers getting to know the tight-knit community of around 2,000 inhabitants, Windward presents a vision of humans both at peace — and of a piece — with natural landscapes. That these humans happen to be children grants each scene even greater vitality.
Still from Sharon Lockhart, Windward (2025) (© Sharon Lockhart, 2025)
The first shot presents a lean stretch of blue sky followed by white rock then green field; the sound of waves and wind-swept grass compete for our attention. So lulling is this landscape that you might miss the figure crossing the beach in the middle ground. Is it a girl? A boy? As the child stands on top of the hill then skips across it, gender feels irrelevant in the face of such equanimity.
Aside from the youth themselves (who, given their apparent whiteness, suggest a history of Indigenous erasure that preceded their existence), there are few signs of human presence, save the occasional pile of abandoned timber or old tub askew on the hill. In one scene, the shadow of a kite glides over a cliff before the sail floats into the frame. A red-shirted boy stands below, his hand pulling an invisible string; in the background, tiny flecks of color descend a geologic formation, the only clue that he is not alone. But to be alone in these places doesn’t feel so lonely. We are pulled into an almost prelapsarian vision of childhood existence: no phones, no screens, no sense of impending climate crisis.
Still from Sharon Lockhart, Windward (2025) (© Sharon Lockhart, 2025)
In this way, Lockhart’s cinema of the extreme pastoral feels oddly Romantic, mingling the sublime with the picturesque. Both magnificent in scale and soothing in tenor, the extreme long shot is taken to a bucolic extreme. But rather than simply dwarf her human subjects, each tableau invites us to watch them frolick as part of the natural environs. When two girls romp around a field strewn with stones and whistling reeds, they belong, as do the gangly urchins creeping toward the tide, the crash of the waves drowning out their squeals.
Lockhart has long been celebrated for her meticulous photographic composition, often printed at epic scales, as with her 2008 depiction of shipbuilders at Bath Iron Works in Maine. She is also known for her moving portraits of children, as in her 2005 Pine Flat series. But rather than grant us a sense of their individual personalities, Windward presents the Fogo youth from so far away that they are indistinguishable from each other. They are an intrinsic part of the landscape, which in their presence cannot feel so austere.
“I don’t think there are many people out there who actually sit through a film, start to finish, in a gallery,” Lockhart once mused in a 2010 interview with filmmaker James Benning. When viewed in a theater, Windward demands that we do just that — feel tiny and huge at the very same time.
Still from Sharon Lockhart, Windward (2025) (© Sharon Lockhart, 2025)
Windward (2025), directed by Sharon Lockhart, was co-commissioned and co-produced by Fogo Island Arts, the Vega Foundation, and the National Gallery of Canada, with the support of the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. It premiered at the 63rd New York Film Festival on September 27.
