Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

In the first documentary of the trilogy, Manufactured Landscapes, we allowed ourselves to be guided by Burtynsky’s photographic essay on the industrial revolution in China. The extraordinary, by no means didactic way in which he portrayed places was our point of departure. We sought to translate the transition from photography to cinema intelligently, in a deep, intimate relationship with the material. In Watermark we worked on the idea of human interaction with water, exploring every aspect of the ways in which we use it: for survival and daily needs, for industry, recreation and religion. We juxtaposed different contexts – sacred bathing in the Ganges during the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage and girls cartwheeling on Californian beaches, for example–and gathered testimonies, such as that of Inocencia Gonzales in Mexico, whose fishing community was decimated by a river delta that largely dried up.

The premise for Anthropocene: The Human Epoch – humans have changed the Earth and its systems more than natural processes – is a step backwards from our previous documentaries, inspired directly as it is by the research of the Anthropocene Working Group. The film required a global perspective to show that today human beings, active only for about 10,000 years, completely dominate a planet that came into being about 4-5 billion years ago. How could we convey this supremacy on the screen, balancing large-scale perspectives and detail? We made use of the most innovative techniques we could afford on our budget but, even so, it was important to relay a more profound, reserved dimension. It’s here that the ethics of our engagement in our documentary practice is fundamental.When you travel the world for you project, it’s vital to try to carry it out with humility and be open to what the context wants to tell you about itself, especially about its neglected, sometimes ignored areas.