Timetable

Becoming Animal

Emma Davie, Peter Mettler

CH / UK
2018
Documentary
78’
OmU
Focus

PLEASE NOTE: Becoming Animal runs only on June 17 at 8 p.m. at Schauburg Dortmund. You can’t buy tickets for this particular screening online. Reservations can be made by Email to lindner@frauenfilmfestival.eu until 10 a.m. on the day of the screening. You receive a reservation confirmation by sending the contact form or the QR code. Reserved tickets must be picked up 30 minutes before the start of the screening. You can also buy tickets at the box office.

In Becoming Animal, more-than-human creatures come to the fore. In a filmic dialogue, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram invites us to build relationships with other animals and the world that surrounds us. The universal scholar has had a lasting influence on the US environmental movement. His book Becoming Animal is the basis of this film. Using visually innovative means, Becoming Animal advocates a mindful approach to nature and proposes a new kind of nature film, where the act of seeing and looking back becomes the focus, and at the same time, the mediation of this experience through cinematic devices is revealed.

»How can we articulate our changing relationship with the ›natural‹ world, and can cinema and technology become a vehicle for waking us up to what is around us? When we are truly in touch with our senses, how different is our relationship to the world? What is contained within this notion of ›reciprocity‹ […] between our senses and what we encounter? If this interconnection is so integral to our sense of being, why do we continue to separate ourselves so much from nature? What has made us lose this connection? Of course, within this question there is already an important separation: we describe ›nature‹ as something fundamentally apart from ourselves. This is a central paradox that we were always aware of and engaged with throughout the process of making Becoming Animal.« Emma Davie

Director / Script

Emma Davie, Peter Mettler

Cinematography

Peter Mettler

Sound

Jacques Kieffer, Peter Bräker, Peter Mettler

Sound Design

Jacques Kieffer

Music

Atom, Thomas Tallis, Gregorio Allegri, Frank Bretschneider

With

David Abram

Production

Maximage GmbH, Scottish Documentary Institute, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, Cornelia Seitler, Brigitte Hofer, Rebecca Day, Sonja Henrici

Contact

GMfilms

Emma Davie

Emma Davie has made documentary films since the 1990s and she also teaches at the College of Art in Edinburgh. Her film I Am Breathing garnered various international awards and has been shown in over 50 countries. In 1991, she appeared in Mettler’s Tectonic Plates. This marked the start of her creative work, which has continued to develop and evolve.


Films by Emma Davie (Selection)
I Am Breathing 2013 | What Age Can You Start Being an Artist? 2004 | 71˚N 2004 | Gigha: Buying Our Island 2002 | Flight 2000 | Seaview 1996

Peter Mettler

Peter Mettler lives in Canada and Switzerland. In his films, he melds intuitive-associative processes with drama, essay, experiment and documentary forms. Mettler collaborates with artists such as Atom Egoyan, Fred Frith, Robert Lepage, Andreas Züst, Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Michael Ondaatje.


Films by Peter Mettler (Selection)
The End of Time 2012 | Petropolis 2009 | Gambling, Gods and LSD 2002 | Balifilm 1996 | Picture of Light 1994 | Tectonic Plates 1992