Letters from the Field

Every spring, established ant colonies exile their royalty – small populations of reproductive female and male ants. These winged layabouts suddenly spring into action, flying up into the air to enter clouds of mating ants, called leks. They mate for the first and last time with ants from neig

Ctenophora / Comb Jellies are the oceanic species that recently initiated a radical re-drawing of the Tree of Life - from the bottom up. This video was captured during a full moon upwelling at Hope Island, British Columbia - as raw material for installations that consider alternate evolutionary path

A film about bugs having the time of their lives.

Coronation Park is constructed from shots of bare maple and oak trees in winter. The images are paired with the single word breathe. Inspired by the many languages spoken in the city of Toronto where the film was shot, the words rhythmically appear then disappear, each time in a different language.

Biosemiotic Borneo – a more explicitly sonic than visual piece of art – lingers around a giant Banyan tree that stands in the Meratus Mountains in Southeast Borneo. Drawing attention to the semiotic processes of world-making in nature, the audio-visual work explores how artists and

Are hipsters becoming a subspecies of humans? What is life expectancy? How do they dress? How fast does their beard grow? In the spirit of Jean Rouch's Chronicles of a Summer, anthropologist Eleanor Drew goes on an exploration into the unknown and conducts interviews with bypassers to understand the

Mr Nishida is an entomologist. He has a close bond to the natural environment. On a scientific expedition to the island of Yakushima, an island of mountains shrouded in a seemingly eternal mist, he serves as our ferryman for discovering the spiritual beliefs that accompany the relationship that the

White Planet represents the border between dream and reality. It is a planet with a milky atmosphere, where the ground emanates light and on which the earth's spatial-temporal rules, feelings and perceptions are altered. The planet is a wrinkled giant animating overflow, eating and disorienting the

The Shark in the Park visualizes the growth and development process of a special strawberry species called "Parco Pistris" which has been discovered by a Korean scientifical research group KSPRI in 2016. KSPRI commissioned animation-director-collective Polynoid to take their research and create a vi

Granting culture to nonhumans, Shape Shifting outlines a cartography of a landscape found in many parts of Asia, which in Japan is called satoyama—space between village and mountain. Satoyama signifies the diffusions between 'wild' and 'designed' and can be understood as a membrane arranged th

In a deep fjord in Norway a small community is changed forever, as a new European road route threatens the local toads. A Toad Story is a warm film about seeing greatness in the planets smallest creatures.

Facing a sea of dunes, hands are putting together a heap of documents – maps, samples, 3D scans of landscape, thermographies. They elaborate a manifold, experimental and invading cartography of a moving landscape. This manipulation work erects Stella -an unpopulated seaside resort- as a milieu

The giraffe is the animal with the biggest heart. The distance between its head and its heart is three meters, so the heart is big enough to send the blood all the way up. When the giraffe is lying down, its heartbeat touches the ground-it goes underground. All animals are tuned to the heartbeat of

A meteorologist who narrates his experience in the Arctic through a voice recording; And how his life is linked physically and spiritually to nature. Below 0 ° is an animated short film that uses fictional documentary as its main narrative resource. The main theme concerns the life of Vladimir K

This short documentary explores the topic of traditional plant medicine from two perspectives - that of Don Juan Tangoa Paima, a curandero who works with Ayahuasca medicine in the Peruvian Amazon and through the research of Dr. Dennis McKenna, an American Ethnobotanist looking for new plant compound

A film centred on the production of landscape and concrete in the Arrábida Natural Park, Portugal. Covering a vast area of coast, caves, mountains and forest, the park is inhabited by a massive concrete factory that branches through the landscape. Documenting the various layers of the sourced

Go 'behind-the-scenes' of British nature show Ocean Discovery in this tragicomic mockumentary: Violet (a camera-girl with a wry sense of humor) and Ingrid (a marine biologist with a singular passion for whales) go looking for the loneliest whale in the world (with a voice too high for the others to

The rock of Gibraltar is shared between two primate species: people and monkeys. The monkeys populated the upper rock long before the latest human inhabitants, the British, arrived, and now, 300 years on, there are tensions between the two. Attempts to expel the monkeys from the town with peashooter

biopiracy |ˌbʌɪəʊˈpʌɪrəsi| noun [ mass noun ] the practice of commercially exploiting naturally occurring biochemical or genetic material, especially by obtaining patents that restrict its future use, while failing to pay fair compensation to the community from which it originates. The US patent act

Desertification in Kenya resulting from unsustainable development and use of trees for firewood, has caused substantial environmental damage such as Drought, land erosion, dried up river bed due to insufficient amount of rain and lose of wildlife and birds; Social damage such as families going hungr

The Stability of the System is an exploration into the material agency of images and of forms and their ability to call each other into being.The film begins with a mathematical point willing itself into dimensional existence, inventing/discovering space, then time. Shot on the volcanic island of La

Against the backdrop of political upheaval, an ancient network of orchards thrives in the mountains of the Sinai desert. Filmmaker Bryony Dunne shadows two Bedouins as they nurture their gardens and are nurtured by them. This poetic portrait of symbiosis digs deep into the perceptual complexities be

"Leafcutters" is an unusual collaboration with millions of wild ants. Focusing on four supposedly unique human traits - language, ritual, war and art – the narrative aims to blur the boundaries between culture and nature.

A vintage nature film explores the migratory pattern of a herd of wild creatures.

An exploration of people's associations with plants.

In this animated parody of a classic undersea adventure show, an authoritative narrator reveals the wonders and mysteries of the sea — although the banal habits of these homely aquatic creatures are oddly familiar