Two research trips into a possible future of humanity and the very real past of a family history combine to form a narrative about our relationship to time.
A new father visits the hometown of his mother in 1976, accompanied by his wife and baby. At the same time, the NASA Viking lander is sending the first images back to Earth from the surface of another planet. Using the father’s travel journal as a guide, and re-contextualising archival footage and photographs, this film explores our yearning to bridge a gap: the gap between parents and children, between points in space, and between the present and the past.
Marionette master U Sein Aye Myint has practised his art for more than forty years, continuing the traditional skills passed down from his father. But the Covid pandemic and the military coup have prevented him and his puppets from performing. When the roof of his small workshop in Yangon’s North Dagon starts leaking in the monsoon, he has to clamber up to fix it himself to ensure his beloved puppets do not get wet. Observing him with age-old wisdom in their eyes, his puppets seem to sense all the things that are weighing heavily on his mind: his lack of income, his precarious future – and just how much he misses his audience.
A young Burmese woman who was trafficked to China and sold into marriage tells her story. Based on the real-life protagonist’s words and beautifully rendered in pen-and-ink, this animation portrays a woman torn between her love for the child she was forced to bear and her longing for the country to which she may never be able to return.
I grew up in Yangon. In February 2021, my dreams came to an end. My mother said: “Son, wake up. The military has taken over the country”. The days got darker. The window in my narrow room and the piece of sky I watched seemed to be the only freedom I had left. I wanted to say something about this new undercurrent in my life. I wrote things down, recorded my voice, and searched for images that might reflect my feelings and those of other young people. And now there is a film which conveys what it's like to lose the ground beneath your feet.
A storm of queer norm-busting archive images. The creative arrangement is as sensual as the material, including purple colour explosions and a jazz music leitmotif.
Between birth and death, is the power to love and live. Political rules, religious orders, social norms and cultural taboos control who we love and how we love. The right to love is controlled and regulated by how we live. But the erotic has the power to emancipate. With spoken word and archive sources, love is unboxed from categories in queer expression and a celebration of eros as the power to change our attitudes to life and to allow others to live their lives without judgment or prejudice.
Built in the 19th century, this Tamil Hindu temple in Thanlyin, across the Bago River from Yangon, is unique in the largely Buddhist Myanmar: this is a place where people from different religious backgrounds come to pray in the hope that their wishes will be fulfilled. Fortune-teller “Yellow Mother” is one of four inhabitants of Pilikan village who – in between lively spectacles of leaping cows and cow-catching – explain what the temple and its rituals mean to them.
A short animated documentary exploring the immigration experience through the eyes of a little Israeli girl learning how to swim with clothes on in the Netherlands.
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.