EXCLUSIVE: Issabella Orlando’s poetic documentary film ‘Topos’ is now available for streaming

By Natalia Albin Legorreta

Topos, a poetic documentary, premiered in Spring 2025 to a slew of screenings in cultural venues, arts programmes and film festivals. Director Issabella Orlando has now released the film on her own platform.

An exploration of memory, heritage and belonging, the six-minute short was shot amidst the hills of Calabria in southern Italy and the roads of Crete. Its narration and long, visually stunning shots prompt the viewer to ponder their own ancestral ties and relationships with their homelands.

Topos is Orlando’s first poetic documentary, blending her disciplines as poet and filmmaker. Her aim has been for the film to help start conversations about traumas of displacement due to current political environments.

“There’s a big conversation happening right now across the creative industries around the importance of artists having ownership of their own work and how it’s presented,” Orlando says on making the decision to stream the film on her own platform, “We did a lot of hunting around for the right streaming service for Topos, and none of them seemed to provide the care, transparency, accessibility or ownership that my own platform would, now and in the future.”

She added: “It’s been such an honour to connect with audiences and hear about their own relationships with landscape through the process of screening the film; now, it feels so good to be able to share this project, which has so much of myself in it, with a much wider audience.”

The short is produced, written, directed, filmed and edited by Issabella Orlando. Music is by J. E. Dufton and vocals by Bethan Jones.

You can view the short documentary below: