Greenland struggled over, a dried-out Cape Town and the Chinese sea cables that connect the world. The capacious global eye of the documentary unit Field of Vision
If your taste in documentary runs to people like Errol Morris or Adam Curtis, then you will love the surrealistic approach to reality taken by Field of Vision.
It’s a “documentary unit” that’s backed by the alternative media network First Look Media, founded by ex-eBay mogul Pierre Omidyar (First Media also produced the news site The Intercept, and Topic Studios.
The docs run to about 18-20 minutes - long enough to be absorbing, short enough to be inserted in your day. (For open access to the full archive over the last five years, go to their Vimeo page). They also provide a very useful documentary filmmaker support guide, full of relevant resources and funding links.
The video above is Utuqaq, and here’s the blurb from Aeon:
Greenland is the world’s largest island, a sprawling landmass covered by a notoriously receding ice sheet. With a population of just 56,000, it’s also one of the least populated places on Earth. The vast majority of these Greenlanders are Greenlandic Inuit, with roots on the island stretching back centuries.
Recent decades, however, have brought a new kind a visitor – climate scientists with complex devices for drilling and prodding the Earth. Setting up temporary camps that tend to leave permanent marks, they aim to peer into the deep past preserved in the ice, hoping that it will offer hints about the climate’s precarious future.
An impressionistic work of nonfiction with science-fiction influences, Utuqaq(‘ice that lasts year after year’) juxtaposes images of a scientific expedition to Greenland’s ice sheet with a poem about the visitors, narrated in Kalaallisut, a variant of Greenlandic Inuit language, by Aviaja Lyberth. As the US-based filmmaker Iva Radivojevic’s otherworldly and often beautiful exploration unfolds, two distinct perspectives on the stark white landscape slowly emerge.
FoV: ‘The United States and China are in the midst of a power struggle: a new “Cold War” of technology with companies like Huawei at the center. “Cablestreet” offers viewers an unprecedented look inside the notorious telecoms company.’
The film-maker Meredith Lackey explains to us via email: “The global consumer internet has made humans feel insecure in a way we’d never felt before. Unlike the Industrial Revolution that occurred 100 years prior and powered the physical world, the Information Revolution held the potential to expand the thing about us that was most difficult to name and touch: the capacity of the mind. Before the internet, an auto factory machinist could repair an assembly line while mentally traveling in time and space to Vladivostok, the Easter Islands, or the year 2063.
“This activity — thinking — could be done in bed, prison, or an open field. And other than losing time that could have been spent making money, thinking didn’t cost anything. But when the internet came about, our capacity to think was fundamentally changed. Individuals and societies figured out how to leverage networks and large-scale thinking for big financial and geopolitical payouts.
“As fiber optic cables were strung across land and through seas, our societies changed, but the very thing that changed them was hidden from view. Those in power started to tell stories about the internet and its potential, and it became increasingly difficult to say if these stories were true. Looking at the internet is a visual ‘year zero’ that lets us talk about how it’s changed our lives, how and if we should govern it, and who’s in control.”
FoV: ‘What happens when a major metropolitan area runs out of water? In Cape Town, South Africa, residents fear the arrival of “Day Zero,” when the city’s taps will be shut off.’
The city has been experiencing a severe water crisis since early 2017, when the municipal government began pleading with residents to conserve water. The engaging and often surprising vignettes expose the exacerbation of social inequality due to water shortage, and give a stark representation of the impacts of the global climate crisis.