Frome director’s new climate crisis film gets celebrity support

FROME film director, Robbie Sloan, has released a short film to help highlight the current state of the climate and biodiversity crises and to inspire people to protect the planet. 

The film, titled ‘Deserves To Bloom’, has received the backing from a variety of celebrities keen to support environmental conservation, including Oscar winner Olivia Colman, Caitlin Moran, Ceallach Spellman, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Ben Goldsmith. Proceeds from the film are going to support the work of the UK rewilding charity Heal.  

Robbie came up with the idea of creating a film as a fundraiser for rewilding in 2019. He has two young children and realised a moment would arrive where they would ask him what he’d done for the environment. Inspired by David Attenborough’s declaration that we need to rewild the world, he set about conceiving the film Deserves To Bloom. He set up a Crowdfunder to enable people to watch the film and donate to the charity Heal. 

Robbie explains, “The UK is one of the worst performing countries in the world for nature and in the race to restore biodiversity, we’re losing. We’re 189th out of 218. We’ve lost 97% of our wildflower meadows since the Second World War, and 90% of our freshwater habitats in the last 100 years. 1 in 10 species are now threatened with extinction. It’s time to heal our natural environment. We must rewild – and we can.” 

His film, Deserves To Bloom, features the British-born and Barbadian-raised award-winning poet and dancer Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, who appears as ‘Mother Nature’. “I wanted to bring Mother Nature to life in a human form and also I wanted to find a woman of colour to play the role,” said Robbie. It was really important to make the conversation on the climate and nature crises more inclusive, and not just featuring the white middle class.”  

Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman said, “I’m thrilled to be supporting Deserves To Bloom. It has never been as important to care about our planet and for us all to do what we can to protect our natural world and to fight climate change. The team at Heal are at the forefront of this battle. The work of this amazing organisation will create new places for wild creatures to live safe from harm and help vulnerable species to recover. It will also allow future generations to experience a world full of beauty that may otherwise not be able to be enjoyed. I am excited for the future of Heal.”  

The charity Heal was launched on 30th March on a mission to raise money to buy land across the UK and rewild it, giving the land back to nature, forever. Heal aims to purchase its new foundation site in the south of England by 2022. The charity’s long-term goal is to create a new rewilding site in every English county and make rewilding more inclusive and accessible, particularly to people living in urban areas.  

Heal is creating structures which embed inclusivity, equality, and diversity into everything it does and recognises the widespread barriers and injustices that exclude many communities from the environmental sector in Britain. Heal’s focus is to reject the status quo and to increase representation of ethnic diversities in the British environmental movement, while dismantling the societal barriers that exclude people from participating in the nature and climate change movement.  

Chair of trustees for Heal, Jan Stannard said “In Deserves To Bloom, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa holds us all to account with her powerful words and moving appeal to help nature. It cannot wait any longer for our help. Everywhere I look, I see the absence of wildlife. But we can rewild and give new space to hundreds of thousands of species, and help reverse the effects of climate change.”  

To watch ‘Deserves to Bloom’, visit www.healrewilding. org.uk 

Pictured left: Frome film director Robbie Sloan. Below: Award-winning poet and performer Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa portrays Mother Nature in Robbie Sloan’s film, ‘Deserves to Bloom’.