Robert Persons spent 11 years on this debut film, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Using maps and lush nature imagery, referencing both courthouses at town centers and the decentering effects of interstate highways, Persons meditates on the geography of, and environmental destruction in, the region that’s now Missisippi, Alabama, and Georgia. But his ambition to present a “cosmology,” as he explained in an interview, is thwarted by skewed, fuzzy-headed, and sometimes cliched thinking: the nature images only rarely suggest ecological connectedness, cities shown in images devoid of people are dissed in the voice-over narration for lacking “communion,” and what we’ve “added” to the land is decried with (duh) an image of a nuclear power plant.