Movies from Earth is an opportunity to contemplate our future through the lens of 25 films created amid the environmental precarity of the past five years. Navigating our fraught relationship with our only home, the filmmakers showcased here reflect on our past while imagining a future complete with pleasure, plants, cities, liberation, friends and neighbors, water, and gentleness. Though the terror of climate disaster is present in these works, they also offer ways to imagine how both humans and Earth may continue to exist, and suggest that the answer to our survival may lie with our ancestors. Reflecting on the legacies of colonialism and corporate exploitation that have led to mass destruction of plant, animal, and human life, these films offer a space for both grief and imagination. The series includes recent work by Cauleen Smith, Manfred Kirchheimer, Francisca Alegría, Truong Minh Quý, Sarah Friedland, and many more.
Organized by Brittany Shaw, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film.
Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.
Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by Debra and Leon D. Black and by Steven Tisch, with major contributions from The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art, the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Karen and Gary Winnick, and The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston.
