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'Anthropocene,' the Groundbreaking Exhibition With Thought-Provoking Imagery and AR Installations, Will Travel From Canada to Europe

ARTFIXdaily

Breathtaking photographs and films, immersive augmented reality experiences, cutting-edge technology: Anthropocene ends Friday in Ottawa

This groundbreaking exhibition explores human impact on the planet through large-scale photographs by Edward Burtynsky, film installations by Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier and, new from the artists, augmented reality installations. A 236-page exhibition book is available.

The show will travel to Fondazione MAST, in Bologna, in the spring of 2019 for its European premiere.

Anthropocene, the multimedia exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Canada until February 24, 2019, is the result of an ambitious four-year collaboration between the renowned artist Edward Burtynsky and award-winning filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. Using the most cutting-edge technology of our time, combining film, photography, augmented reality (AR) and scientific research, the exhibition offers a spectacular panorama of the enormous impact humanity has had on the planet.

Read the full article here.

'Anthropocene' Introduces the Darkest Man-Made Wonders of the World

By Luke Hicks
Nonfics

Astonishment. Pure, lurid, ravishing, genuine astonishment. That is Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. At times, you have to quadruple take, and what you’re looking at still doesn’t fully click. It’s so impossible to comprehend yet such a significant achievement in scientific study and documentary storytelling. Its story is massive in scope. On the short end, it covers 10 millennia, the span of human history. On the long end, it spans 4.5 billion years, the duration of the Earth.

“Anthropocene” refers to the recently coined epoch that many distinguished geologists and scientists believe we have entered as a result of the human manipulation of the Earth and its resources. Technically, as far as the official Geological Time Scale is concerned, the Anthropocene Epoch has not been legitimized. But, as you can imagine, it takes a little while to prove that the geological conditions and processes of the Earth have been altered enough to warrant official worldwide identification and confirmation of our current time interval.

Read the full review here.

Berlin Fest’s ‘Anthropocene’ Looks at Human Impact on the Environment

By Nick Clement
Variety

The documentary “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch,” which screens as a Berlinale Special, exists as one part of a multimedia project, conceived by a trio of passionate and dedicated filmmakers: Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky. The Canadian production enlisted Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander for voice-over duties and serves as one component of a vast spread of multimedia disciplines, with all efforts exploring the intense impact that humans have made on the Earth, in any number of geological ways.

Read the full article here.

A man-made landscape is writ large on the screen in Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

By David D'Arcy
The Art Newspaper

After its US premier at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the visually stunning documentary heads to Berlin

The deep brown curves of a strip mine in New Mexico seem like contours of a woven carpet. So do the rows of a palm oil plantation in Borneo alongside a lush green rainforest. A vast garbage dump in Kenya has its own luminous topography, with plastic gleaming like jewelled inlay. Like glowing flows of molten lava, these and the many manmade environments observed in the film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, which premiered at Sundance, are no less troubling for their eerie allure. Nature isn’t what it used to be.

Read the full article here.

REVIEW – Edward Burtynsky with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier: Anthropocene (Steidl, 2018)

By Katriina Etholén

I have here on my table the latest book by the Toronto based photographer Edward Burtynsky. The scale of the book is impressive – three kilos, 36 by 29 centimetres and 236 pages. But it’s not just the book’s size that is impressive; the theme is vast as well. It was while viewing the wondrous photographs on the walls of the Flowers Gallery in London that I decided that I needed to familiarize myself better with his current Anthropocene project and the book with the same name.

This is not the first time I have explored Burtynsky’s work. I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing him in the spring 2011 in Stockholm, just before the opening the exhibition Burtynsky: Oil in Fotografiska. I wrote two articles about him, one to go together with the oil exhibition and other one describing his large-scale project concentrating on water that he was working on at the time.

Edward Burtynsky is one of Canada’s most significant contemporary photographers. He has won multiple prestigious awards for his work and is known for his large colour photos of man-made landscapes. His projects are deep studies of the subjects, usually lasting several years. He has shown the scars and wounds that man has cut on the earth and completed vast projects on oil and water, the liquids that fuel and sustain our everyday life. His diverse body of work includes mines and quarries – which have followed him from early projects to this latest one – salt pans and ship breaking yards, railcuts and container ports, homesteads, consumerism, recycling and so on. Anthropocene is his thirteenth book and is part of a larger project.

Read the full review here.

Berlin According to Documentarian Edward Burtynsky

By Etan Vlessing
The Hollywood Reporter

A world-renowned still photographer, Burtynsky returns to the fest as co-director of 'Anthropocene: The Human Epoch,' a documentary about humankind's harmful impact on the environment.

Favorite Berlin moment?

I spent a day with an incredible tour guide. This was in advance of a shoot I was doing for the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. We toured the Libeskind-designed Jewish Museum, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Track 17 Memorial and a number of other moving sites.

Read the full interview here.

Alicia Vikander-Narrated Climate Change Doc ‘Anthropocene’ Nabbed by Kino Lorber

By Etan Vlessing
Hollywood Reporter

The Canadian film, by directors Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky, is set for a September theatrical release.

The Canadian documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, narrated by Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, has had its U.S. rights nabbed by Kino Lorber.

The climate change film that explores the human impact on our planet debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival before a recent screening at Sundance and ahead of a European premiere in Berlin. Kino Lorber plans a September theatrical release to coincide with the UN Climate Change Summit 2019.

Read the full article here.

Seville International licences ‘Anthropocene: The Human Epoch’ to Kino Lorber (exclusive)

By Jeremy Kay
Screen Daily

Seville International announced from Sundance on Tuesday (29) it has licensed US rights on Anthropocene: The Human Epoch to Kino Lorber and struck key additional international sales.

The documentary from Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky is the first acquisition by Kino Lorber in association with Kanopy, the free streaming platform available to college students and professors, and public library members across the US.

Read the full release here.

“Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” Beautifully portrays the horrors of man’s new era

By Pamela Powell
Reel Honest Reviews

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” is the third film by Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky to address the environment, preceded by “Manufactured Landscapes” (2006) and “Watermark” (2013). The film, narrated in layman’s terms by Alicia Vikander, gives us a stunning visual education of our current world’s state as we leave behind the Halocene Era, one which nature provides changes, to the Anthropocene Era, where man is responsible for all of them.

Read the full review here.

“I was Amazed That We Got Permission to Film in Russia”: Directors Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky | Anthropocene – The Human Epoch

Filmmaker Magazine

Whenever directors watch their own films, they always do so with the knowledge that there are moments that occurred during their production — whether that’s in the financing and development or shooting or post — that required incredible ingenuity, skill, planning or just plain luck, but whose difficulty is invisible to most spectators. These are the moments directors are often the most proud of, and that pride comes with the knowledge that no one on the outside could ever properly appreciate what went into them.

So, we ask: “What hidden part of your film are you most privately proud of and why?”

The scenes in the film from Norilsk and Berezniki in Russia have particular resonance for us, for a number of reasons.

I was amazed that we got permission to film in Russia. All our research indicated that it’s never been harder to get a North American camera crew into the country since the Cold War. And we were pushing it even more by trying to get into underground mines in the Ural mountains and into the “closed city” of Norilsk. To film in the subterranean, psychedelic potash mines, the tunnels of which span over 3,000 kilometers, we needed an invitation from the mining company. Norilsk, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is a one company town of around 175,000 people. It has the largest colored metal mine (chances are your cellphone has palladium in it from Norilsk) and heavy metals smelting complex in the world, and is one of its most polluted cities. There is no road or rail access. Because of its strategic importance and gulag forced-labor history, even Russian citizens need special permission to go there. It took a long time to process the visas and I felt the odds were insurmountably against us, and that we were just going through the motions to say we had tried. Then one day they arrived. Incredible. — Nicholas de Pencier

Read the full article here.

Sundance Film Review: ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch

By Alexander Ortega
Slug Magazine

ANTHROPOCENE: THE HUMAN EPOCH SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

Directors: Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, Edward Burtynsky

Imagine yurt-like structures made of elephant tusks. Then shift your vision to bright-green pools of lithium in a middle-of-nowhere desert, with pipes flowing the alien-looking liquid from one area to an adjacent one. Grimy machinery forges red-hot iron shapes then cools the metal objects in pools with nary a human hand. These images, together, may seem like they’re from a space western or a novel set in a dystopian future, but they’re contemporary, real-life images from Earth, depicted in Sundance documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.

Read the full review here.

Paul and Ed's Excellent Adventure

World-famous environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky and IDEAS host Paul Kennedy both grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario. In fact, their childhood homes were less than 300 metres apart, and young paperboy Paul delivered a daily dose of newspaper comic strips to future visual artist Ed.

Paul and Ed lived parallel lives close to — but separate from — each other. When they eventually met in 2008, they talked about one day doing an episode of IDEAS, in which they'd return home to revisit their shared roots. Well, they did it: welcome to Paul and Ed's Excellent Adventure. The two made plans to visit the old GM plant on Ontario Street where both of their fathers had worked. The plant was bought by General Motors in 1929 to manufacture cars after World War I and was the largest employer in St. Catharines until its closure in 2010.

Listen to the full episode here.

Toronto Film Critics name Anthropocene the year's best Canadian film

By Norm Wilner | NOW Toronto

But co-directors Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier surprised the room by giving away the $100,000 cash prize

The Toronto Film Critics Association awarded Anthropocene: The Human Epoch the Rogers best Canadian film award – and a cash prize of $100,000 – last night. It’s a despairing documentary about humanity’s devastation of the natural world, but Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier – who co-directed the film with photographer Edward Burtynsky – made a very optimistic move.

Having won the TFCA’s top award twice before, for their previous Burtynsky collaborations Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark (which claimed the TFCA’s second $100,000 purse in 2014), Baichwal and de Pencier announced they would not be accepting the prize money this time, instead dividing it into thirds and donating it to the young directors of the other nominated films, Sofia Bohdanowicz (Maison Du Bonheur) and Sadaf Foroughi (Ava), and to TIFF’s Share Her Journey project, for which Baichwal is an ambassador.

Read the full article here.

ANTHROPOCENE grabs $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award

By Bruce Demara
Toronto Star

ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch, a film that chronicles humankind’s devastating impact on the environment, has been awarded the $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award by the Toronto Film Critics Association.

The award, the biggest annual prize in Canadian cinema, was given to filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier at the association’s annual gala Tuesday night by actor, writer and director Don McKellar. Photographer Edward Burtynsky shares the prize with them.

Read the full article here.

Edward Burtynsky Depicts Our Alien Domain

By Louis Bury
Hyperallergic

The power of Edward Burtynsky’s landscape photographs is undeniable. Their sweeping aerial perspectives are shot in a style that verges on abstraction without losing their figurative referent. The breathtaking, large-scale images depict landscapes altered and scarred by human industry and development. The stepped terraces and switchback roads of a dusty, Mars-red mining site resemble the desiccated ruins of an ancient civilization (“Tyrone Mine #3, Silver City, New Mexico, USA,” 2012). A taupe jigsaw of desert roads connecting brine wells evokes a circuit diagram (“Brine Wells #1, Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, Chile,” 2017). Burtynsky’s intricately patterned and textured landscapes possess a crop-formation exoticism; yet it turns out that we humans are the architects of this unnerving and seemingly alien terrain.

Read the full article here.

Stirring Images of Our Impact on the Environment

By Amy Brady
Hyperallergic

TORONTO — Standing in a spacious gallery at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, I held back tears as I watched piles of confiscated elephant tusks go up in flames. The moment had been captured by filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. The poignant short film is as part of the AGO’s Anthropocene, a deeply moving and thought-provoking exhibition about humanity’s impact on the Earth and its inhabitants. The exhibition includes large murals accompanied by short documentary films, three augmented reality installations, and dozens of photographs by Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky of landscapes forever altered by human activity.z

The art evokes many emotions: sorrow, anger, grief. Yet a quote attributed to all three artists printed in large lettering on a gallery wall insists that their work was never intended to place blame but, rather, to generate awareness: “Our ambition is for the work to be revelatory, not accusatory, as we examine human influence on the Earth both on a planetary scale and in geological time. The shifting of consciousness is the beginning of change.”

Read the full article here.

[PRESS RELEASE] TORONTO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES 2018 AWARDS

ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch, Ava and Maison du bonheur compete for Rogers $100,000 Best Canadian Film Award

Read the full press release here.

TIFF's Top 10 Canadian Films names 'Anthropocene', Haida-language feature

CTV News

TORONTO -- A documentary about humanity's impact on the Earth and a feature shot in the Haida language are among TIFF's top 10 Canadian features of the year.

The organization that runs the Toronto International Film Festival released its Top Ten lists of features and shorts of 2018.

View the full list for Canada's Top Ten here.

Aerial Photographs Convey Humanity’s Devastating Effects on Nature

By Lev Feigin
Hyperallergic

“If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end,” wrote the novelist W.G. Sebald in Rings of Saturn. From the window of a plane above an urban sprawl, we witness among geometries of rooftops, factories, and highways “infinite networks of complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine.”

Photographing such complex, large-scale networks from the air has been the career-spanning pursuit of the Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky. For more than three decades, his work has focused on the impact of human activity on the environment from a God’s-eye view, prompting us to think about our species, our purpose, and our end.

Read the full article here.

Anthropocene art installation explores human impact on the environment

CBC News: The National

Three artists have made it their mission to put humanity's impact on the environment on display. CBC's Adrienne Arsenault spoke to the artists to discuss Anthropocene, the documentary and multimedia exhibit.

Watch the segment here.