Film Categories: Anthropocene

  • Precipice

    Moving images & Music: Kent Tate 4k Humans create narratives about themselves then make great effort to conform reality to that narrative. This wasn’t a threat to planetary survival 10,000 years ago when we were scattered in small bands worshiping local deities and relying on nearby gathered foodstuffs with only stone tools. It’s quite another thing when we are packed into mega-cities with nuclear weapons and ambiguous connectivity with relationships imbued in instruments that far exceed an individual’s capacity to fully comprehend or to reliably navigate our various systems. The earth spins around the sun at 30 km/sec. The habitable…

  • Symbiosis

    Occasionally I’m able to spend time in a place where I can observe how the natural world takes shape outside the anxious time frame of our hurried species. In this world relationships seem to have evolved to perpetuate balance over long periods of time as opposed to short cycles of calm interspersed with brief periods of chaos. Overruns and schedules don’t appear to exist there as they do in our manufactured world. Symbiosis is defined as a close, prolonged association between two or more different biological species. This relationship can be symbiotic (mutualistic), where both parties involved benefit from the…

  • La noirceur souterraine des racines

    Shot in Quebec (Canada), La noirceur souterraine des racines (The subterranean blackness of roots) is a 16 mm film triptych which uses several processes specific to analog cinema (hand processing, optical printing, photochemical alteration). The film seeks to show the sensory experience of the invisible life of stones, plants, and the nature that surrounds us.

  • Tarpaulins

    The point of departure for “Tarpaulins” was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit…

  • Memory Rituals [Part Two]: Memory of Trees

    The second in an ongoing, annual series. Thinking about remembering, about forgetting, and about the memory of trees.

  • Ecopoiesis

    In moments of monstrous pareidolia, all the things that we don’t consider alive form a new world, a world in our image. Ecopoiesis explores the concept of terraforming, reimagining it through the lens of cosmic horror. Blurring the lines between terrestrial and extraterrestrial, the film invites viewers to challenge their perceptions of human impact on an alien environment, as the visual and auditory landscapes evoke a sense of planetary unease. Within its abstract representation, Ecopoiesis delves into the ethical and existential dilemmas posed by transforming foreign worlds by infecting them with humanity.

  • Perplexity

    See the liminal spaces of abandoned offices and adjacent corridors through the eyes of someone who feels at home in them. The entity’s wanderings, punctuated by close-ups of materials or digital surfaces, provide an opportunity for empathy with something that, like us, is looking for a way out. Meanwhile, electronic music, permeated by the fragile vocals of Vaclav Pelousek, embraces the mise-en-scène in an almost redemptive gesture. Perplexity is a journey that traverses the non-human condition, as seen from a non-human perspective. It asks its viewers to seek solidarity with a non-human person. Utilizing a distinctive blend of animation techniques…

  • Artifacts

    Artifacts connects fragments of an audiovisual transmission from a distance. In the fog of the events that unfold, the outlines of actors appear, revealing a catastrophe that they have caused. Artifacts is a speculative fiction film that combines computer animation created in Unity3D with documentary footage from the present day and from the archive. The footage is complemented by a deep fake actress, and AI also entered the film-making process when writing the script – the film captures situations directly proposed by a neural network. As speculative fiction, Artifacts depicts an ecological disaster that seeps from reality into the virtual…

  • We will talk about this after the last air raid alert stops

    This film, shot within a game simulation, focuses on the opposition between culture and nature and the possibilities of dealing with obsolete mechanisms of environmental exploitation. It’s a utopia about a post-war city that launches a recultivation program. The program is an attempt to create a new society where the aims of people do not stand in the way of the aims of other people, trees, rivers, chipmunks, mushrooms…” The game simulation was used as a platform to develop a speculative scenario in which humanity survives the challenges of the current century. Looking at the dystopias of the last century,…

  • The Wind Probably

    A human is observing the deserted streets of his hometown on the edge of the Apocalypse. The world is on the verge of being absorbed by the Black Hole. Familiar places in the ruins are difficult to recognize and it’s hard to find the clues to understand is it a reality or dream. The sensation of “not quite real” is the sensation experienced during a catastrophe. In a person’s attempts to orientate the disintegrating reality, the only one with whom he can discuss what is happening is artificial intelligence.