Termites offer Lisa Truttmann an unusual way of approaching the city of Los Angeles. The visual framework for this film are huge, colourful plastic tarpaulins which are used by exterminators to control termites. Buildings are wrapped up and unwrapped and presented in the film like gigantic, temporary works of art. The termites do what they are destined to do: eat dead wood. The architectural structure of LA is made of wood.

Offscreen, we hear experts speaking: media historians, construction workers, exterminators, entomologists, chemists, urban planners, writers and travellers. Enthusiastically following these digressive trains of thought, the director personally reviews the meandering discussion: she rejects, comments on and intently follows the habits of the termites and fascinating plastic structures, gradually exposing political, social and economic relationships between the inhabitants of the city. Preoccupation with the termites and their hunters raises questions about damage and the damaged, life and death, profit and loss, familiar and unfamiliar, microcosm and macrocosm.

In collaboration with The Golden Pixel Cooperative.