Grass with Live Score by ZÖJ

Grass with live score by ZÖJ is a rare chance to experience one of cinema’s great silent documentaries as a shared, immersive event. Presented by Castlemaine Documentary Festival (CDoc), the screening restores cinema as a collective ritual, where film, sound and audience meet in the same room.

Made in 1925, Grass follows the seasonal migration of the Bakhtiari people across what is now Iran, a vast journey undertaken by tens of thousands of people and animals. It is a powerful record of endurance at human scale, bodies moving with land, weather and time. ZÖJ perform live in response to the film’s rhythms and shifts, shaping music that moves with the image and heightens breath, weight and duration. The result is a heightened focus that recorded sound cannot match.

This is not a conventional screening. It is an invitation to slow down and be carried by a film that still astonishes with its scope and humanity.