EARTH

Humanity has become the decisive geological force of its era. That observation opens the new film by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, about the marks we are leaving on the planet. Seen from above, human beings are tiny dots that make giant tracks. He films materiality and the resulting upheavals: mines, quarries and construction sites in the Americas and Europe. He also listens to the people who work in such places, giving them room to express their ambivalence, doubts and certainties. The film’s large-scale observation, from an apparently omniscient, clinical perspective, takes on a subversive tone when it concludes with an account of the Indigenous struggle at Fort McKay, Alberta.