The Anthropocene screening is part of a nationwide release to coincide with the U.N. Climate Summit in New York. It will screen simultaneously throughout the USA and therefore we shall exceptionally be holding our Monthly Screening on Wednesday rather than the regular Thursday.
Presented by VTIFF
Host Sponsor: Main Street Landing
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, Edward Burtynsky
Narrated by Alicia Vikander
Canada | Documentary | 87 mins | US release 2019
Festivals: TIFF, Sundance, Berlin
Followed by Q&A with Adrian Ivakhiv. Adrian is the Steven Rubenstein Professor of Environment and Natural Resources and a Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont. His books include Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (2018) and Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013). His forthcoming book Image Regimes: Toward an Ontology of the Image-World includes an analysis of Edward Burtynsky’s, Jennifer Baichwal’s, and Nicholas de Pencier’s Anthropocene Project.
A cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive re-engineering of the planet. Anthropocene follows the research of an international body of scientists, the Anthropocene Working Group which, after nearly 10 years of research, argues that as a result of profound and lasting human changes to the Earth, the Holocene Epoch gave way in the mid-twentieth century to what they call the Anthropocene Epoch.
From concrete seawalls in China that now cover 60% of the mainland coast, to the biggest terrestrial machines ever built in Germany, to psychedelic potash mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains, to metal festivals in the closed city of Norilsk, to the devastated Great Barrier Reef in Australia and massive marble quarries in Carrara, the filmmakers have traversed the globe using state of the art camera techniques to document the evidence and experience of human planetary domination. At the intersection of art and science, Anthropocene makes the case that we are witnessing a critical moment in geological history — and brings a provocative and unforgettable experience of our species’s breadth and impact.
