A Soft Bed Waits
(work in progress)
Moss fills the foreground. Behind it, the human world hangs upside down, caught in magnifying glasses. Bryologist Bill Buck has spent fifty years at this scale. Between taxonomy and memory, he turns over a life shaped by plants so unlike ourselves.
A Soft Bed Waits is an experimental feature-length documentary centered on moss and human attention, currently in production.
The film’s macro lens and magnifying-glass optical system creates a shared perceptual field between moss and the human world, holding both in simultaneous clarity and unstable relation, and reorganizing scale and orientation.
Within this field, Bill Buck, a bryologist and Curator Emeritus of the New York Botanical Garden, enters through sustained, close looking — his image, always upside down. Conversations shift between taxonomy and memory, between moss and the lives shaped around it. Bill spent fifty years studying moss alongside his husband, a lichenologist. Morphology turns to reflections on the life they built and the spiritual questions that arose after his husband’s death.
Guided by these encounters and by moss itself, the film also follows the filmmaker — negotiating the system and the inverted image, conducting the experiment of sustained attention on himself first. The film records transformation in process, uncertain of its outcome.
Director, Cinematographer, Editor — David Scott Kessler
Featuring — William Buck, Curator Emeritus, New York Botanical Garden
Microscopy — Steph Mantis
Funded in part by the Philadelphia Independent Media Fund Planning Grant
Residency support — Sitka Center for Art and Ecology