Earth

We live in the age of the Anthropocene. Humankind has become the decisive factor for fundamental changes of the planet. Nikolaus Geyrhalter explores how this is happening in a very literal way. His film shows how human beings move and change the surface of the earth. Humans move several billion tons of earth every year - with excavators, drills or dynamite. In mines and quarries, at large construction sites and coal mining areas, Nikolaus Geyrhalter observes people in their constant efforts to subjugate the planet and appropriate its raw materials: an inventory of mankind as the most important factor influencing the fundamental and irrevocable changes to their home planet. In seven chapters, Nikolaus Geyrhalter takes us to sites of surface and underground mining in Europe and North America that are otherwise difficult to access. At Brenner, a base tunnel is being driven through the mountain to provide the world's longest underground rail link. To meet global demand, the marble quarries in Carrara, Italy, are now quarrying a hundred times more blocks than thirty years ago. In the former salt mine in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, on the other hand, efforts are being made to preserve the greatest possible stability so that - until a new final repository is found - the nuclear waste stored there cannot cause any further damage. The film shows construction sites and opencast mining areas that leave open wounds in the earth's crust as a result of tireless upheavals of immense proportions: In the open-pit lignite mine in Gyöngyös, Hungary, in the middle of a prehistoric swamp cedar forest; in the copper mines at Rio Tinto, Spain, where metal has been mined since the Roman Empire; amid the oil sands in Alberta, Canada, on the territory of a First Nation; or at a giant construction site in California's San Fernando Valley, where mountains are being ground down to create easy-to-build land for new cities.