Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
The world has lost some 11 per cent of its tree cover since 2000, mainly due to agricultural expansion and wildfires. This shrinking is especially alarming given forests’ vital role in removing carbon from the atmosphere, which helps to curb climate change, and in maintaining biodiversity, which can help to prevent future pandemics. In Deforest, Grayson Cooke, an artist and associate professor of media at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia, explores deforestation in a beautiful yet distressing work of audiovisual art. A series of monochromatic photographs of an old-growth rainforest in subtropical Queensland are dissolved in a corrosive sulphuric acid bath, serving as a visual metaphor for our destruction of nature. As these images are erased, sounds from the forest’s animal life mingle with a somber piano score, creating a powerful reflection on how humanity burns the past to fuel the present at its own peril.
Director: Grayson Cooke
video
Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
video
Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
5 minutes
video
Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
video
History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
video
Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
4 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
video
Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes