Since the 2000s, debates around the Anthropocene have clearly influenced documentary cinema. Amid an acute climate crisis and development without brakes, humanity keeps repeating the error of destroying its own habitat. The environment is no longer an object of preservation, nor a stable dwelling for human beings. In this crisis of extinction, filmmakers resist the dystopia seen as our inevitable future and seek to reconfigure the ecosystem. They see nature neither as humanity’s opposite nor as an inviolable realm to protect; they choose instead to be in discord together with it, entering the ecosystem while admitting that what is lost cannot be restored. Restructuring our vertical, human-centered worldview is the most fundamental task before us today. This year the festival programs such practices under the new category of Eco-Documentary, gathering gestures that seek to sense and describe ecology anew under the incommensurable title Living Together in Discord.
The section is grounded in documentaries that emerged with the Anthropocene after 2000: Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Tohoku Trilogy, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s hybrid film Mekong Hotel, and major works by Nikolaus Geyrhalter and James Benning, joined by fresh perspectives discovered at recent festivals. Corresponding closely with questions—where is the human, where is the camera, what can cinema do—these fifteen films offer alternative ways of thinking that reconfigure the relations between human and nonhuman, nature and civilization, coexistence and discord.