"To say that there are no easy answers to planetary woes is to state the obvious. But the film seeks to reveal rather than lecture, in the hope that our eyes will convince our brains to act before it's too late." - Peter Howell, Toronto Star
"Stunningly, even hypnotically shot - from the world's largest landfill in Kenya, to the most polluted city in Russia (Norilsk, Siberia) to tons of tusks representing 10,000 dead elephants. A hard doc to walk away from unaffected." - Jim Slotek, Original Cin
"As always, the images they capture are stunning and damning in equal measure." - Andrew Parker, The Gate
A cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet, Anthropocene is a four years in the making feature documentary film from the multiple-award winning team of Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky.
Third in a trilogy that includes Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013), the film follows the research of an international body of scientists, the Anthropocene Working Group who, after nearly 10 years of research, are arguing that the evidence shows the Holocene Epoch gave way to the Anthropocene Epoch in the mid-twentieth century, as a result of profound and lasting human changes to the Earth.
From concrete seawalls in China that now cover 60% of the mainland coast, to the biggest terrestrial machines ever built in Germany, to psychedelic potash mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains, to metal festivals in the closed city of Norilsk, to the devastated Great Barrier Reef in Australia and massive marble quarries in Carrara, the filmmakers have traversed the globe using high-end production values and state of the art camera techniques to document the evidence and experience of human planetary domination.
At the intersection of art and science, Anthropocene witnesses, in an experiential and non-didactic sense, a critical moment in geological history — bringing a provocative and unforgettable experience of our species’ breadth and impact.
Official Selection – Toronto International Film Festival, 2018