Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

Few documentarians have made a more visceral case against humanity’s virus-like incursion into the planet as has Jennifer Baichwal. The Canadian nonfiction filmmaker has long been a large-scale image-maker in a country with a decidedly humbler realist tradition, her work defined by maximalist tableaux and geopolitically tangled narratives that, despite their frequent focus on the process of artists, tend toward the macro rather than the micro. Recently that penchant for the sprawling has seen Baichwal burrowing into the large canvas of the Earth to examine the way our intrepid but callous species can’t help but muck up whatever spaces it fills.