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Ten artists and designers reflect on the onscreen flora, from fantastical topiaries to scene-setting bouquets, that’s inspired them.

By Laura Regensdorf

The movie-watching experience usually occurs at a remove from nature: in an air-conditioned theater, at home on the couch, on a trans-Atlantic flight. But directors know that, somehow, film has a way of recreating the transporting feeling that can be gleaned from a landscape — or from a single obsessed-over bloom. Then too, as the visual artist Jenna Gribbon says, “flowers lend themselves easily to metaphor.” A bouquet can foretell sexual awakening or looming despair; a forest might swing from primeval to portentous. To assemble a watch list filled with just this sort of beauty and meaning, we asked 10 creative people whose work abuts the botanical world to share flora-filled films that have made an impression and even informed their own practices.

“Border,” Ali Abbasi, 2018

Katie Stout, 37, artist and designer

I heard about “Border,” by the Iranian-Swedish director Ali Abbasi, through my husband, who has Swedish citizenship. It takes place in a forest, so everything is mossy and lush and wet. The two main characters are border patrol agents who fall in love, and their bodies almost seem to reflect their environment — not in a heavy-handed way, at least not at first. I went in not knowing what to expect, and there’s a major twist. The film explores ideas of gender, nature versus the [civilized] world and what’s beautiful and what’s ugly. In my work, I think a lot about the fine line between beauty and the grotesque. I often create flowers from my imagination or memory, and when I’m talking with glassblowers, I might say, “Let’s make some that are more nefarious-feeling, and then we need some that are more SpongeBob.” I find there’s weirdly a lot of optimism in decay. It leaves room for transformation. And isn’t that the whole point of life, having the opportunity to become other things?

“Stealing Beauty,” Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996

Nicole Wittenberg, 47, artist

I watched this on repeat when I was 16 and convalescing from back surgery. My parents had gone to pick up movies for me, and when they went to return the tapes, I hid this one because it’s so beautiful. There’s a loose, not really compelling plot about a girl, played by Liv Tyler, who goes to Italy to find her father. I don’t even remember watching it with sound, but I remember the visual sensation — shots of the flowers and trees and hills. There’s one sex scene, and it happens at night outdoors: the idyllic story that everyone wishes was how they’d lost their virginity. The film was totally panned, but the people who worked on it were amazing. Darius Khondji, the Iranian-French cinematographer, also shot “My Blueberry Knights” (2007) for Wong Kar-wai and most recently [Josh Safdie’s] “Marty Supreme” (2025). I’ve been making erotic paintings for years now — sometimes based on strange search queries made on amateur porn sites, like “moonlight” or “Bavarian hike” — and they come out of the feeling of this film, in a way.

Read the full article online on The New York Times Style Magazine.