Full interview text

The following interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Tiboris: Welcome to the VMO show. I’m Mike Tiboris from River Alliance of Wisconsin. And today on the program, I’m joined by Ben Albert, the Milwaukee-based documentary filmmaker whose recent film, “An Invitation to Wonder,” will have a special free community showing at the McFarland Performing Arts Center on April 9th at 6:30 p.m. The award-winning film explores the Waubesa Wetland south of Monona with retired UW-Madison wetland scientist Calvin DeWitt, who also happens to be Ben’s grandfather. Ben Albert, thanks for joining me today.

Ben: Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me on your show.

Mike: So, Ben, tell us a little bit about the film and what inspired you to make it.

Ben: “An Invitation to Wonder” explores Waubesa Wetlands, just south of Madison. And it really aims to uncover the mysteries and magic of wetland ecosystems in a way that I feel like not many other films have done. These are some of the most misunderstood and underrepresented habitats on the planet. So, the film is trying to provide a new lens on wetlands. But it also is definitely… it’s a family story.

There’s kind of three characters. There’s the wetland, of course, and then there’s my grandfather, Cal DeWitt. And I’m also in the film. When I was a kid, I actually spent a lot of time in the wetland. My mom would drop my siblings and I off at my grandparents house. Almost every Friday growing up, my grandma would take us out into the marsh with a dip net and a bucket and we would net through the creek and uncover this really amazing web of life that was there that you don’t really see on the surface when you go out to a wetland ecosystem. Lots of people think of it as just a green, wet place. But when you look beneath the surface and uncover some of the organisms there, it is just this fascinating web of life.

Mike: You mentioned that your grandfather is a sort of character in the film, and I wonder a little bit about what lessons you learned filming it with him that were new to you from your experience with him as a child.

Ben: Yeah, a lot of lessons. Some people might know my grandpa, some people might not, but he is just an incredibly passionate scientist. He has lived on the edge of the wetland for over 50 years, him and my grandma Ruth. And he also taught at UW-Madison and taught in environmental science. And then brought his students out to the marsh to teach wetland ecology courses. So he’s very connected to this land, both with his studies and his personal life.

So I knew that just with his very unique perspective and then my experiences as a kid in the marsh that there was a story there and I just I didn’t know what it was at the time when I started but I wanted to uncover that. He instilled so much wisdom on me through that process and he loves to tell stories. I think one of the most amazing moments is I got to take him out canoeing in the marsh again. I’m not going to say too much about it because it’s in the film. But you know, he had just turned 86 years old. And just seeing the wonder, the childlike wonder and curiosity that he still has at his old age was very inspiring to me. And I think that’s something that we can all strive to maintain as we grow up. And I think it’s a way that we can, no matter where you are in the world or what your situation is, be able to find some of that wonder and curiosity and joy of, you know, just the world. And in his life, he focused that on this specific wetland. But I think it’s very universal and something that we can take away that applies to other things in life as well.

Mike: If you’re just joining us, I’m here today with Wisconsin-based documentary filmmaker Ben Albert, whose recent film about Lake Waubesa’s wetlands will be having a free community showing at the McFarland Performing Arts Center on April 9th. Ben, before the track break there, you were talking about wonder, and the movie’s called “An Invitation to Wonder.” So what does wonder mean in that context?

Ben: Yeah, in the context of this film, “An Invitation to Wonder” is taking wetland ecosystems, this unglamorous place that, you know, I think a lot of people when they think of wetlands, it’s a green, wet, bug-infested place that’s maybe a little bit you know, uninhabitable, kind of scary to some people, but when you spend the time out there as my grandfather has done and then later as I do through the film I spent around six months filming in the wetland. Three of those months were consistently going out almost every day. But the invitation to wonder is looking at this place with my grandfather’s perspective honestly with a perspective that if you look closely and you’re patient that the wonder is always there. Specifically talking with the natural world I think this applies to, you know, much beyond just wetland ecosystems.

I hope that people after watching this can take that message and look at what might be in their own backyard and, you know, think just like, do I actually understand this place that I live? I think a big issue that we have with, you know, our relationship with the natural world is well, just that we don’t have that relationship anymore. Like we’ve lost that connection to where we live in a sense. So the invitation to wonder is kind of thinking about what’s around me, what’s in my own backyard, what’s in my neighborhood, and really thinking about the natural world as being part of our communities again, I think is very important.

Mike: I think a lot of listeners are pretty familiar with the chain of lakes around Madison connected by the Yahara River, but probably less so with the Waubesa Wetlands specifically. What are some surprising and interesting things about it that you’d like to share?

Ben: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most surprising things for me was just how wild the wetlands felt when I was exploring them. I only saw about maybe five other people my entire summer there. And the animals there are also still, like, you can kind of tell when you’re in a place that has been… there’s not a huge human presence. The wildlife in Waubesa Wetlands are not habituated to people. So, for example, sandhill cranes in the wetland, I was lucky to get within a quarter mile of a crane or else it would spook and, you know, you would see it flying away in the distance and I would lose my shot of it. But if you go into Madison, Wisconsin, you know, in the city, we have sandhill cranes that you can walk up 15 ft next to.

So it was very interesting to be in a place that still felt very wild. Even like the blackbirds, the blackbirds would always kind of alarm all the other critters and animals I was there when I was trying to when I was canoeing through or walking through. There’d be sometimes blackbirds flying over my head shooting off their alarm calls. And then I knew I was toast trying to film anything else for the next few hours because everything knew of my presence. So that’s one thing. I would say I also just learned a bit more about the importance of the wetland for water, for filtering our water, the amount of water it holds is just extraordinary. It can be flooding up and down the Yahara chain. In Waubesa Wetlands you don’t really notice the flooding because it just absorbs the water. And it also releases an incredible amount of water. Just deep spring alone pumps out about 10,000 gallons of water per minute. And that, of course, feeds into the rest of the water system. So, it’s a very important habitat for us right here in Madison.

Mike: Welcome back to the VMO show. I’m speaking today with Wisconsin documentary filmmaker Ben Albert, whose film, “An Invitation to Wonder” about the Waubesa Wetlands, will have a free community showing on April 9th, and tickets can be reserved at the McFarland Performing Arts Center website. So, Ben, tell me about the filming process for the documentary. How did you go about capturing the experience of the wetlands?

Ben: So this was my first long- form documentary. Up until this point I had made maybe a 10-minute documentary and for that I had an outline and did pre-production and had the narrative arc set in a way. But for this film, I felt like I had to just go out and experience the wetland for myself before I could even really decide what the story should be or what the most impactful parts of the film would be. And of course, I knew my grandpa was going to be a character. And he was going to help guide the story, but other than that, I just took it one day at a time.

And as I mentioned earlier, I camped at my grandparents’, at their house. They live on a glacial drumlin that’s surrounded basically 360 degrees by the marsh. So they’re just immersed in this world and it’s a pretty incredible spot to live. And gives me incredible access to this habitat. So I camped in their backyard. It was COVID time. I had a bit of a reset in my life and had the time to do this film. I think a lot of us were in that situation during COVID and yeah, it was just a natural… the story just unfolded naturally day after day of really just canoeing out into the marsh. I usually went out around sunrise with my camera and it was interesting because especially during the first few months I usually had an objective I wanted to complete that day. Like I really had hoped to film sandhill cranes nesting in the spring and filming their colts, you know, as they grow. Never filmed them. Never, never found a nest.

And then there was, you know, a few other sequences I was really hoping to capture. And every time I went out to capture those things, the wetland would always throw something else at me that would distract me and bring my attention to something else for the day. And at first that was very frustrating because it was hard to, you know, have an intentional story going into this. But I realized over time that I had to just let go of my human expectations and ideas of what the film should be and just experience it and capture it as it is. And that really led to me being able to capture a portrait of the whole ecosystem. And I don’t want to say the whole ecosystem because I think the film, you know, it’s just the surface of this place. Even though we go deep and we go underwater, we talk about the history. I really think that there’s so much more mystery and things to discover there that we don’t know about yet. and my grandpa would say the same.

But the story just really unfolded naturally in that way and all those little tangents I talked about allowed me to capture this portrait of the whole habitat. Then I sent it to a few friends for feedback. I also have a co-writer/producer who helped with the project, Moss Hegge. And they are very good with narrative storytelling. So they looked at it and helped me determine what the missing pieces were. And a big one was just the third character, which ended up being myself. And I don’t love, you know, being in front of the camera, but what we decided was just that… my relationship with my grandfather and with the wetland was a key part to the story as well because really it’s… at its core, you know, it’s my grandpa passing on that knowledge and wisdom that he’s learned from the wetland to me and then me being able to present that to more people. I ended up doing… ended up narrating the film, some of the film, just to help guide certain pieces. And I also had all of this footage that was just candid moments of me in the wetland experiencing different things, struggling through the peat, going out at midnight, to go under a full moon. And I was never planning to include it in the film, but after making that decision to have myself as a character, I was able to weave in these very authentic, candid moments into the film that I think helped tie it all all together.

Mike: You’re listening to the VMO show and I’m talking to documentary filmmaker Ben Albert today. His documentary about our very own Waubesa Wetlands will have a free community showing on Thursday, April 9th at the McFarland Performing Arts Center. We’re very lucky to have such abundant water in Wisconsin. How do you suggest that people get a better connection with the water around them?

Ben: It’s funny, I don’t want to encourage thousands of people to go explore Waubesa Wetlands because we want to keep these places wild. But I think just discovering where you live and going out in a canoe or kayak is really the only way, the best way to do it. There’s only so much you can learn about through a film or through a textbook. And I think just going out and experiencing yourself is the best way to do that.

Mike: And having such a great documentary will be a way that people can experience it. Ben, can you give the audience a little bit of a preview of what they should expect?

Ben: Yeah, I think “An Invitation to Wonder” will force you to slow down a little bit. We really wanted to give that authentic feeling of being in the natural world where you’re… you open yourself to learning from it. And that doesn’t happen quickly like a lot of other nature documentaries that throw in the fast chase scene of the lion or, you know, are cutting the sequences really quick. That’s not really how it is how it feels like to be in nature. So, we wanted to portray it accurately. But I think it’s a beautiful film in the sense that you really get to experience what a wetland… what it’s like to be in a marsh and you get to see past what the vast majority of the public’s perception is of wetlands. You get to see the mysterious aspects of this place. You get to see under the surface. You know, half of a wetland is the hydrology system and under the water, which I fortunately with some camera techniques was able to capture that.

So, yeah, I hope it is something new to most audiences. And you get to witness my grandpa and his… who’s lived in the town of Dunn, just south of … near McFarland for over most of his life, was very active in that community and the town of Dunn, you know, my grandpa worked with them and with his neighbors to actually preserve the marsh in the 1970s. So, it used to be unprotected. There were even proposals, I believe, for a highway to be built through this place and the town came together as a community really through what we’ve been talking about just falling in love with the land. And through that they were able to gain the support to protect it permanently and it still is protected permanently.

Mike: Ben Albert’s award-winning documentary, “An Invitation to Wonder” about the Waubesa Wetlands, will be shown at the McFarland Performing Arts Center on Thursday, April 9th at 6:30 p.m. The showing is free and all ages, though tickets may be reserved in advance through the McFarland Performing Arts Center’s website. More information about the film can be found at waubesafilm.com. Ben Albert, thanks for joining me on the VMO show.

Ben: Thanks so much for having me on.

– Stacy Harbaugh, Communications Director

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