You’ve heard of climate change but this latest documentary-spectacle from Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter (The Border Fence, DocPoint 2019) is about landscape change. Geyrhalter’s film is alerting us to the vast changes to terrain and geology that are being made with large-scale mining and construction, industries that are gouging out the Earth’s contents, hollowing out whole areas, flattening and moving mountains.
The film starts with the statistic that humans move 156m tons of rock and soil a day, making our species “the most decisive geological factor of our time”. Geyrhalter supports this with eerie and scalp-tinglingly vast landscape shots that are now a feature of his work: images of Kubrickian strangeness, like pictures from another planet, some distant, grim, mineral-rich moon that we are callously exploiting because we don’t care about it.
You might compare this to the landscape cinema of James Benning. But Geyrhalter proves again that he is a unique figure in world cinema.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Language: German, English, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian
Subtitles: English
- Name in Original Language: Erde / Earth
- Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
- Country: Austria
- Year: 2019
- Length: 115
- Age limit: null
- Cinematography: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
- Editing: Niki Mossböck
- Music: Florian Kindlinger
- Production: NGF - Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion GmbH
Showtimes:
- Cinema Sõprus: Saturday 1.02 - 15:30