Private Project

A Black Rail's Tale

A tiny Black Rail guides us through South Carolina’s former rice plantations, revealing how landscapes engineered by enslaved people have become a refuge for one of North America’s rarest birds.

A Black Rail’s Tale is a five-minute animated short illuminating the persistence of Black Rail in former Low Country rice plantations created more than two centuries ago by the labor of enslaved African Americans. Writer and narrator J. Drew Lanham has written and spoken extensively about the difficult history embedded in these marshes and their current importance as bird habitat and as places of public reflection and uplift. Award-winning animator Lynn Tomlinson’s fluid, clay-on-glass technique perfectly suits the nebulous nature of interstitial tidelands and of history itself.

Seldom heard and even more rarely seen, a Black Rail is a small and secretive bird who makes its home in the vast landscape of wild and abandoned rice fields of South Carolina, originally built through the stolen expertise and forced labor of enslaved Africans. The film weaves together art, history, landscape and ecology, and was created by award-winning animator Lynn Tomlinson, and poet and cultural ornithologist J. Drew Lanham, with music composed by acclaimed guitarist Yasmin Williams. This unique animated documentary was executive produced by BirdStory and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

  • Lynn Tomlinson
    Director
    Ten Degrees of Strange, The Elephant's Song, The Ballad of Holland Island House
  • J. Drew Lanham
    Writer
  • Craig Saper
    Producer
  • Lynn Tomlinson
    Producer
  • J. Drew Lanham
    Key Cast
    "Narrator"
  • Yasmin Williams
    Music
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Short
  • Genres:
    Enviromental, Animation, Nature, Documentary
  • Runtime:
    5 minutes 10 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 20, 2026
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Distribution Information
  • Lynn Tomlinson Productions
    Distributor
    Country: United States
Director Biography - Lynn Tomlinson

Lynn Tomlinson is an artist and award-winning director of animated short films. She uses a unique clay-on-glass animation process, manipulating thin layers of modeling clay frame by frame to create painterly images under the camera. This handcrafted approach allows her work to come to life through shifting perspectives and on-screen transformations. Her films explore environmental themes, often imagining how non-human beings might view humanity’s impact. Lynn’s award-winning animations have screened around the world at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Pompidou Center, as well as international animation festivals such as Annecy and Ottawa International Animation Festivals.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

In A Black Rail’s Tale, I use clay on glass animation to connect the story of one of North America’s most elusive and endangered birds to the layered history of South Carolina’s former rice fields, through the reflective storytelling of writer and narrator, J. Drew Lanham. Our film explores landscapes engineered by enslaved Africans, later reclaimed by the marsh, and now vital habitat for the Black Rail and countless other species. Yasmin Williams’ evocative guitar and kalimba extends the film’s emotional and ecological resonance. Through Drew’s lyrical narration and the fluid, ever-shifting quality of the animation, I hope to draw viewers into a meditation on memory and resilience, and to reflect on how paying close attention to a nearly invisible bird can reveal profound connections between history, ecology, and our responsibility to the living world.

Writer's Statement:
Black Rails and many other wild wetland beings, including dozens of bird species, likely benefitted from the misery of enslavement as that loathsome work made primary forest into brackish marsh. However, the wild non-human beings are not to blame for reaping a side harvest created by greed and hate. It is a rare opportunity for us to artfully address what was, and how we might reconcile now with what’s to come. This is the recognition.

Yes, “saving” the Black Rail is our conservation mission, but in this collaborative work, expanding what we know and feel about the ecological, and inextricably tangled human-impacted context of its existence, is critical in whether we will succeed or fail. This is our reckoning.

We do this work for all of us, for humanity, for wildness and for the Black Rail. Hearing a “kikkikerrrrr” under a full moon in an old Combahee River rice field, but yet never seeing the tiny bird but knowing it creeps mouselike through the high marsh ground, is a part of the Reparation we seek by tending to nature’s thriving in a way that heals by wild reclamation, a bit of a wounded landscape’s soul.

A Black Rail’s Tale is American history wrapped in the plight of a fist-sized bird. It is our story; a lesson of past wrongs, a better understanding of the imperiled present and a look forward at making things better.

– J. Drew Lanham