In southern California, date palms from the Middle East grow, tales from One Thousand and One Nights are told and a volcanic eruption is expected. A document of enchanting simultaneity.
Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from the Middle East flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining colour 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley, Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensory, polyvocal evocation of place.
This impressionist hybrid documentary traces the oyster through its many life cycles in New York, once the world's oyster capital. Now their spectre haunts the city through queer characters embodying ancient myth, discovering the overlooked history and biology of the bivalve that built the city. As environmentalists restore them to the harbour, Holding Back the Tide looks to the oyster as a queer icon, entangled with nature, with much to teach about our continued survival.
How do you grow up on a planet that is being destroyed by humanity? The two friends Bo and Luca are enthusiastic climate activists whom the film follows for four years.
How does one grow up on a planet that is destroying itself? Filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke provides a possible response to this urgent question. For four years, he has followed the beautiful and mischievous friendship between Bo and Luca, two teenagers who are as enthusiastic in their ecological activism as they are in their experience of the contradictory and surprising travails of growing up.
The story of iconoclastic artist Robert Irwin, whose investigations into the nature of perception have radically expanded the possibilities of what art can be.
No artist calls attention to light and space like the legendary Robert Irwin, who has been singular to his minimalist vision for decades. Instilling a sense of the sublime, Irwin is known for his ability to reframe the ordinary into something awe-inspiring. Robert Irwin: A Desert of Pure Feeling provides rare views of the artist's astonishing body of work, including paintings, installations, and site-specific environments. It likewise follows the creation of the artist's latest piece, a revisiting of the ruins of a military hospital in Marfa, Texas. Elusive yet down to earth, Irwin is a true original, eschewing the art market and favouring simplicity in an age of excess. His art is ephemeral and experiential, it cannot be bought, sold, or hung on walls. Director Jennifer Lane has crafted a stunning portrait of one of the most important and influential contemporary artists of our age; the film features fascinating archival footage, and interviews with fellow artists and writers. A treat to the eye, and an inspiration to the mind.
Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers takes us along on her epic quest to map the world's fungi networks and understand their behaviour before it's too late.
Beneath our feet lies a mystery. A complex underground network of mycorrhizal fungi keeps our ecosystem alive by exchanging nutrients and carbon with almost all plants on Earth. Remarkably, no one knows exactly how these sophisticated and ancient systems operate, or how they are affected by climate change.
The Underground Astronaut follows evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers, named one of the 2022 TIME100 Next Innovators, on her quest to map the world's fungi networks and understand their behaviour before it's too late. A fragrant and high-stakes journey into the soil. “No fungi, no future.”
The Underground Astronaut is part of Ammodo Docs, a series of short documentaries about original minds in arts and science.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.