Film Categories: Ecology

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • Endless Thirst

    Endless Thirst is a deep dive into the otherworldly and misunderstood bog biome. Filmed in Canada, it draws attention to the harm inflicted on these ancient wetlands. An aerial view of a bog in its natural state suddenly sinks into the unimaginable, then appears to evaporate into ghostly images of Sphagnum moss (a bog’s keystone species) imprinted on 16mm film. Endless Thirst alludes to the bog’s reliance on water for survival and humanity’s unquenchable desire for resource and supply. It examines the entanglement of human and more-than-human processes that link to the climate crisis.

  • 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,…

  • A Flame the Colour of Air

    Medieval Catholic mystic Hildegard von Bingen reconciles the virgin/whore dichotomy in a psychedelic, erotic vision. Hildegard was known for her waking visions of the divine, her musical compositions, and her extensive medical encyclopedias. The animated imagery in this film is inspired by her surviving transcriptions, which suggest a departure from the mainstream views of her culture. In this speculative fictional tale, Hildegard has a vision in which erotic dancers appear to her as embodiments of the divine. The narration is strategically selected and collaged from Hildegard’s texts.

  • Hedge-Rider

    The Hedge-Rider sits at the boundary between the garden and the wild. She uses flying ointments to transcend her body and take flight during the night. The film attempts to capture themes around European witchcraft and altered states of consciousness.

  • Psychoterra

    Two scientists from the Technomystic Ecology Lab develop technology that processes the ecological grief contained within a database of audio testimonials. In their lab, located deep inside a cave, they alchemize these feelings into a seed archive for an unknown future.

  • Egg is a Cracked Moon

    In a post-disaster volcanic landscape, a solitary stonemason moves rocks in quiet ritual, responding to his inner terrain as imagination and land converge.

  • Gan Tang, The Lake

    In the summer of 2023, the government of Jiujiang launched the Gan Tang Lake Cleansing Project. Within weeks, this ancient lake with over two millennia of history was drained. Nearby in Gan Tang Park, a boy wakes up in the rain. There, the destiny of Gan Tang awaits.