A religious statue comes alive and unites with a boneless girl. They leave the village together with many other figures that have stepped down from the altars.
One day, all the statues in the area come to life. They leave the roadside shrines and pedestals and calmly set off straight ahead, all in the same direction. They do not even stop for a moment. People watch the phenomenon with growing anxiety. None of them knows where they are going and why. Only a little girl with a boneless body marvels at the procession of the unusual figures with pure fascination. They walk without muscles, although they should not be able to walk. How strange!
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.
Surrealist observations at the Italian Adriatic, where seasonal workers toil for the holidaymakers. An unvarnished look behind the façade of the “carefree” beach holiday.
Vista Mare is a poetic and surrealist documentary revealing the hidden labour behind “a holiday in the sun” in Italy's Northern Adriatic coastal resorts. Shot over an entire working season (February to October), it takes viewers on a journey through an artificial landscape built to amuse vacationers. Vista Mare's camera purposefully watches a multi-national army of seasonal labourers toiling from dawn to dusk. Workers test remote-controlled umbrellas, meticulously prepare meals, and most importantly, jolly the patrons into having a good time. Meanwhile, on the shoreline, thousands of guests paddle in the waves and enjoy carefully scheduled fun. Little wonder the demands of their jobs drive the workers to chant “Slaves? Never!” in a protest carefully overseen by the police. In an absurdist loop, Vista Mare watches the workers, who watch other workers play, until the sky turns cloudy, the beaches empty, and the last umbrella closes.
The film focuses on the life experiences of people who have a personal connection to the border with the United States and have ended up stranded in the Mexican city of Tijuana.
The short film Cuando llegue la neblina (When the Fog Comes) portrays the lives of people from the Mexican border city of Tijuana. Through a combination of photographs, animations, and audio recordings, the film delves into the daily realities of four individuals who have different connections to the Mexican-American border.
We meet Isna and Miche, two migrants who fled from Haiti, leaving their children and families behind in their home country. They undertook the exhausting journey through eleven countries to reach Mexico, hoping to get closer to their dream of the “American Dream”. We encounter José Luís, a Mexican man who, after eight failed attempts to cross the border, now waiting for the next fog to try again. We also meet Gustavo, a lifeguard who rescues migrants from the waters as they attempt to swim around the border in the sea.
A Polish fishing village in deceptive winter silence … This expressively designed everyday mosaic of a village community talks of Anka, Jesus, warmth of heart and coldness of feeling.
It grows slowly as an icicle, but one day, it drops and crashes. Anka loves cats. And Jesus. In a winter silence, the lagoon freezes and the unspoken resurfaces like a crack in the ice. A mosaic portrait of a small fisherman's village where human to human, human to animal, animal to animal interdepend on a delicate balance of warm tender care and cold emotional cruelty. An eerie story of loneliness and community narrated with magical realism.
In 2043, humanity launches the spaceship Zoopticon to send a greeting to distant galaxies. An extraterrestrial opera with cheering colours and radiant pop charm in the darkness of space.
Imagine you are the only being in the Universe floating through outer space, all on your own. This is the predicament of the Zoopticon, a spaceship with a face, filled with artefacts of life and culture from Earth. It's also the perspective of five mutated singing animals who don't know of each other's existence – and that they are all on the Zoopticon, just rooms apart. When they finally encounter each other, they realise they are all living souvenirs from a mysterious planet called Earth that have been shot into space as part of a theme park for an interstellar audience. They decide to emancipate themselves.
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.