Directed by Emma Davie, Peter Mettler • Documentary • 2018 • 79 minutes
An inspired collaboration between filmmakers Emma Davie (I Am Breathing) and Peter Mettler (The End of Time) and radical writer and philosopher David Abram ("The Spell of the Sensuous"), Becoming Animal is an urgent and immersive audiovisual quest, forging a path into the places where humans and other animals meet, where we pry open our senses to witness the so-called natural world—which in turn witnesses us, prompting us to reflect on the very essence of what it means to inhabit our animal bodies.
Shot in and around Grand Teton National Park, with its dizzying diversity of wildlife, trails of curious humans in RV’s and billion-year-old geology, the film is a geyser of provocative ideas and heightened sensations related to the sublime circuitry that connects us to our ever-shifting surroundings. Becoming Animal is an invitation to explore our relationship with this “more than human world” and recognise it for what it is: an exquisitely intricate system in which everything is alive and expressive, humans, animals and landscapes are inextricably interdependent, and there is no such thing as empty space.
"Truly amazing. The separation between people and the rest of creation is one of the saddest facts of our day, but as Becoming Animal makes clear, it is not an unbridgeable gulf, not where there is sympathy, good humor, and a willingness to try. David Abram is one of the most remarkable of all Americans." —Bill McKibben
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