Visiting Filmmakers Series Online: A Conversation with Jennifer Baichwal, director of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
Thursday, April 2, 2020 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM EDT
Online Location
A Conversation with Jennifer Baichwal
Director of the documentary, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
Free and open to the public.
A conversation with Jennifer Baichwal. She has been directing and producing documentaries for 25 years. Among other films, installations and lens-based projects, she has made 10 feature documentaries which have played all over the world and won multiple awards nationally and internationally.
Baichwal was born in Montréal and grew up in Victoria, British Columbia. She studied philosophy and theology at McGill University, receiving an M.A. in 1994, supported by a McGill Major Fellowship and an FCAR Master’s Scholarship. Please read her full bio here.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is part of the Anthropocene Project, a multivalent, multidisciplinary body of work. See the website for that remarkable project here.
Before the session, we invite members of the Mason community to watch Jennifer's latest film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.
Kanopy link to Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.
(Available to Mason community)
Thus cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet is a four-years-in-the-making feature documentary film from the multiple-award winning team of 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 Holocene Epoch gave way to the Anthropocene Epoch in the mid-twentieth century, because 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 surreal lithium evaporation ponds in the Atacama desert, the filmmakers have traversed the globe using high end production values and state of the art camera techniques to document evidence and experience of human planetary domination.
At the intersection of art and science, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch witnesses a critical moment in geological history, providing a provocative and unforgettable experience of our species' impact.
The film is narrated by Alicia Vikander.
Interviews with Jennifer Baichwal:
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Jennifer Baichwal – “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch”
Our event is sponsored by Film and Video Studies, English Department, School of Art, Global Affairs and Global Programs, CVPA's Kritikos Series: Arts in Context, the Interdisciplinary Curriculum Committee, University Life, Women and Gender Studies, Art and Visual Technology, Environmental and Sustainability Studies, the Institute for a Sustainable Earth, the Office of Sustainability, the Center for Climate Change Communication, and Delta Kappa Alpha at GMU.
For more information:
Samantha Beach, Film at Mason, sbeach2@gmu.edu
Cynthia Fuchs, Director, Visiting Filmmakers Series at Mason cfuchs@gmu.edu
