Two student films created during the UC Santa Barbara Coastal Media Project, “quwa’” and “The Kelp We Breathe,” are set to premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival Feb. 6-7. The films highlight timely environmental and social justice topics near and dear to California.

The crew that made “The Kelp We Breath” conceptualized their film during their trip to Santa Cruz Island Photos Courtesy of Kelp Crew
“quwa’” details the history of the Goleta Slough and the Chumash people that inhabited the island, as well as highlighting current Chumash community members and their thoughts on the Land Back movement. “The Kelp We Breathe” focuses on the loss of kelp in Northern California and artists who are capturing what’s left and advocating for its return.
The Coastal Media Project is a nine-week environmental media production and documentary studies program sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center that focuses on producing short films about the coastal environment. After four student films were shown at the program’s premiere on Aug. 23, 2024, groups were able to submit their projects to different film festivals.
“quwa’” and “The Kelp We Breathe” will have their world premieres at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) on Feb. 6 at 3 p.m. and Feb. 7 at 8:40 p.m. In its 40th year, SBIFF is an 11-day festival that showcases independent and international cinema.
Prospective students first applied during Winter Quarter 2024 to the new 12-credit summer course. The program began with a week of filmmaking-related challenges such as a film scavenger hunt on Santa Cruz Island — known by the Chumash people as Limuw — as well as navigating the loss of electricity for two days. After the challenges ended, the participating 17 students were selected and split up into four groups of four or five.
“That’s where we kind of got to bond together through cooking and we had to deal with no electricity for two days. So that was kind of crazy,” “quwa’” filmmaker and fourth-year film and media studies major Jade Ipina said. “That’s actually where we initially were able to develop our idea.”
“Honestly, I think it added to the trip. I don’t think it would have been the same if we were all just able to, you know, be on our phones the whole time, or access the internet,” fifth-year environmental studies major Jack Phillips said.
The filmmakers behind “quwa,’” Ipina, fourth-year film and media studies majors Jonathan Coronado and Ryan Grant and linguistics doctoral student Catherine Scanlon, conceptualized their film’s topic after reading an article on the history of the Goleta Slough. Written by founder of GoletaHistory.com Tom Modugno, the article details how the Chumash lived on the slough.
The slough is currently the location of the Santa Barbara Airport and the Goleta Sanitary District, with various habitats such as estuarine and wetlands. However, it was once known as quwa’ island and contained several food and water sources used by the Chumash who inhabited the area for at least 2,000 years, according to Lynn Gamble, an anthropology professor emeritus who was interviewed for the film.
The arrival of the Spanish in 1542 and their subsequent colonization of the land led to the dispersal, death and conversion of many of the Chumash. According to the film, an oak forest on the island was cut down for firewood, destroying the acorn supply — an important Chumash food.
Several other events led to the decimation of the area, including the construction of the airport and the Marine Corps Air Station Santa Barbara in the 1940s which required builders to fill in the slough using land from Mescaltitlan Island. In the film, what remains of the island is highlighted in a shot that shows a strip of land surrounded by highways.
The filmmakers behind “The Kelp We Breathe,” Phillips, fourth-year film and media studies majors Natalie Aymond and Tatum Davis and fourth-year communication major Taylor Ortiz also conceptualized their film during their trip to Santa Cruz Island.
“There’s this huge whiteboard in one of the rooms, and we would just write out a bunch of ideas, like very scattered ideas, but we had an idea from the start that we wanted to do something with kelp,” Aymond said. “With documentary especially, you kind of just have to start following one lead and start from there and it opens a lot of doors to other things.”
The film focuses on the loss of kelp in Northern California and highlights the 95% loss of bull kelp in the region from 2014-15. Regarding the film’s name, kelp produces oxygen and is responsible for around 70% of the Earth’s oxygen. In the film, artists Mo Wise, Marco Mazza and Marie McKenzie illustrate kelp through mediums such as photography, video, painting and sculpture.

The group talked to at least eight people to conceive a cohesive story between the artists and kelp. Photos Courtesy of Kelp Crew
“If you don’t know about something, you’re never gonna really love it or try and protect it,” Wise said. “With every breath you take, the vast majority of it is due to an algae of some sort.”
Both crews said they had limited production experience going into the program but were eager to try different roles and collaborate as teams.
During the pre-production process for “quwa’”, producers Ipina and Scanlon researched and secured interviewees including Chumash Elder, historian and activist Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto and Chumash community member and language student Marianne Parra. Scanlon said that at first there was some difficulty in finding Chumash community members to interview, but she was able to do so through her linguistics network.

Ipiña and Scanlon interviewed John Johnson and Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto during the filming process. Photos Courtesy of quwa’ crew
“We were struggling a bit to get connected with Chumash people, or people who had ancestral connections to the land. We were having some trouble there and starting to think about, oh no, how’s that film gonna work without this?” Scanlon said.
Director of Photography Grant and Sound Designer Coronado were faced with the task of capturing a place that has little remaining of it.
“It was really a challenge to get footage that kind of lend themselves to that kind of imagination about what the island looked and felt like at the time [when Chumash lived on the island,]” Grant said.
“I felt that that was kind of my contribution, how do we make something that doesn’t exist anymore to be heard and seen?” Coronado added.
The crew of “The Kelp We Breathe” also researched and sought out interviewees extensively. The group talked to at least eight different people to conceive a cohesive story between the artists and kelp.
“We would spend a lot of time with each other and just be sitting and brainstorming and researching people and reaching out to them,” Aymond said. “We all didn’t know a ton about kelp. We didn’t really understand the ecological impact it has on not just the aquatic life, but just us as human beings … I think we just really wanted to showcase it in a different light,” Davis added.
The crew behind “quwa’” filmed and edited simultaneously during the final four weeks of the program, often taking on several roles such as camera operators and editors.
“It was more of a collective effort to actually curate that research into the film that you see. Just, you know, how do we actually navigate the subject matter, the history and presenting that, and really tying that to the Land Back narrative,” Grant said. “A big reason why our project was really successful was because we were able to delegate a lot of the work between each other,” Ipina added.
The ending of the film concentrates on the Land Back movement, which aims to reconnect Indigenous people with their ancestral lands both in the physical sense and also as part of a broader effort to combat colonialism in all forms.
“We’re not kicking you out of your house, that’s not what we’re asking, even though that was done to us. We want a space in this area, we would love a native garden, we would love to come harvest here, we would love to get in this gated community,” Parra said.

The quwa’ crew took on several production roles during the program; the group was faced with the task of capturing a place that had little remaining of it. Photos Courtesy of quwa’ crew
In addition to SBIFF, “quwa’” will also be shown at the UCSB American Indian and Indigenous Collective Symposium on Feb. 23.
“I think that stories of about people of color need to be more known, especially during this presidency,” Coronado said. “There’s still kind of that underlying, colonizer mindset that is still apparent in the country.”
The crew behind “The Kelp We Breathe” said one of their goals was to get into SBIFF from the beginning of the program, since two films from the previous year’s coastal program were accepted. They also said they hope to bring awareness to kelp’s importance to the ecosystem.
“I hope that it inspires people to just get out there and try things and learn about things that they don’t know about because there’s so much beauty in the world that you’re not going to know about until you really start to look into it and pursue it,” Davis said.
A version of this article appeared on p.3 of the Jan. 30, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.