Nature is a Beast

The essayistic experimental film “Nature is a beast” examines the modern relation to the environment with a focus on the car. Shot in the National Park Hohe Tauern, the film somatically explores our entanglement with lifeforms that make us desire solutions who are themselves part of the larger ecological problem. This film is motivated by the intuition that the problem of the car is not its exhaust fumes, but that it produces Nature as a modern object of veneration in itself. We want to protect Nature in the same manner we feel the desire to “go to Nature” when we want to relax and get away from our busy lifes. Motorized with fossil-fueled engines, every citizen of modern states can now approach spots of “pristine wilderness” that have been deemed inaccessible or even forbidden and ugly in earlier times. Nature thus becomes an object of consumption not unlike any other product of late capitalism. 

The film tries to approach the contradictions and unacknowledged collaborations of our modern souls in a sometimes hypnotic, sometimes humoristic manner and tries to shake what we cosmologically deem to be self-evident. It is based on Kilian Jörg's book "Das Auto und die ökologische Katastrophe". 

The film is currently under submission at International Festivals. If you would like to see the film for youself, please write me an email and I can provide you with links.

--> Review at wespennest (German)

--> presentation of the film at a talk at the Active Travel Academy in London