Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

A grand and strikingly beautiful journey to six continents. We are guided by the soothing voice of Alicia Vikander, but the message the film delivers is deeply jarring.

This documentary brings us from marble extraction in Italy, via lithium production in the South-American Atacama desert, to the world’s biggest excavator in Germany. Throughout this journey, it makes a compelling argument that humanity has changed the face of the Earth in such a profound way that we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This is the scientific term for the age of Man, and during the last decade a group of scientists have been gathering evidence that the Holocene is over and the Anthropocene has begun.

The film is made by the award-winning directing team of Baichwal, de Poncier and Burtunsky, and completes a trilogy which also includes the similarly striking Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013). And in spite of the deeply unsettling conclusion of this film: The human interference and irreversible changes to the Earth have rarely looked more stunning.