Directed by Graça Castanheira • Documentary • With Vandana Shiva • 2013 • 30 minutes

Ten personalities from diverse social and geographical backgrounds reflect on the world and its future. A portrait in multiple voices of contemporary reality, revealing the deep connections that exist between our mental models and the consequences thereof in our present day—for the individual, for life, and for the planet. A series of lessons about our time and the way we live in it.

Episode 8 stars Vandana Shiva, the Indian physicist combining the struggle for human rights with the protection of the enviroment. She obtained a PhD in Physics at the university of Ontario in Canada with the thesis “Hidden variables and locality in quantum theory.” Shiva combines Quantum Physics with social activism to peacefully resist a system that she considers has colonized the Earth, life, and the spirit. She recounts how she started defending the forest, the seeds, and the local ways of life and production, against the registration and control of patents claimed by multinational corporations. Our civilization, to survive, will have to review its model of understanding and interacting with the world, taking as an example the holistic knowledge of the Chinese and Indian civilizations that, according to Shiva, survived history essentially because they differ from the Occident in the relationship they have established with nature.