Composed of three chapters, this film explores animals, plants, and stones. The first part uses archival footage to question cinema’s own gaze, which confines animals much like a cage, revealing our own exploitative impulses. The second moves to Padua’s oldest botanical garden, observing the quiet rhythms of plant life and scientific care. The third journeys to quarries and monuments, linking stone to war, memory, and our collective responsibility. Through static frames and minimal narration, the film becomes a meditation on what it means to care for and coexist with the non-human world.

Structured as three 40-minute chapters—devoted to animals, plants, and minerals respectively—Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries unfolds as an encyclopedic tribute to worlds beyond the human. The film makes an urgent case for the exploration of these nonhuman realms, which are essential to our own existence. Longtime collaborators Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti capture gestures, speech, and movement in ways that prompt viewers to reconsider their own place in the world. Each chapter adopts a distinct style. 

“Bestiaries: Cinema Invents New Cages” uses found footage to reveal why cinema has been so persistently captivated by animals. “Herbaria: The Cure” is a poetic observational documentary set within the University of Padua’s botanical garden. “Lapidaries: The Fossils of the Future” charts the transformation of minerals into enduring vessels of collective memory within an industrial context. Presented as a tightly connected triptych, each chapter pays homage to a different documentary tradition, employing unique formal strategies. 

Taken together, they pose a profound and vital question: what is humanity’s place on Earth? This is a film about the complex forms of life that must be studied and nurtured for future generations—a work that shifts our perspective, allowing us to see ourselves from beyond the human frame.

We believe that our task is to 're-invent' a vision and representation of reality and establish vital relationships between the elements that fill the frames of the work. In doing so, we do not seek the 'real' but rather the representation of the real. T. S. Eliot wrote that the only way to express an emotion in an art form is to find 'an objective correlative'. In other words, a series of objects, a situation or a chain of events that constitute the formula for that particular emotion.

• ProducerMassimo D'ANOLFI, Martina PARENTI, David FONJALLAZ, Louis MATARÉ
• Screenplay Massimo D’ANOLFI, Martina PARENTI
• Cinematography Massimo D’ANOLFI, Martina PARENTI
• Edit Massimo D’ANOLFI, Martina PARENTI
• Sound Massimo D'ANOLFI, Agit UTLU
• Music Massimo MARIANI