One thing is certain: to make a documentary, not about your parents, a historical event or a political issue, but about nothing other than Life Itself takes guts. And guts, as we quickly learn, are full of microbes that are essential to our own survival – so how much of an ‘individual’ life are we, in fact?
Danish director Max Kestner has a knack for finding these more or less everyday scientific facts with prima facie appeal and philosophical implications. And it’s in science where he’s mostly looking for answers. Although that same science has so far left him wanting. Triggered by the worldwide uproar caused by the euthanasia of a healthy, but superfluous giraffe in a Danish zoo, he embarks on a search for meaning. The meaning of life.
In doing so, Kestner, I believe, represents a large part of our modern population, which no longer looks to religion or philosophy for guidance, but still experiences a certain lack of, well, ‘spirituality,’ a word which is never mentioned but hovers above this documentary.
One word that does come up is ‘loneliness’. Kestner’s children are about to leave home and he is looking for something to fill the dreaded existential emptiness of the empty nest.
If this sounds depressing, his documentary is anything but. Kestner is inquisitive, interested in all sorts of different approaches – above all scientific – and his film is joyfully all over the place. Including an editing style which often feels like zapping through YouTube memes (indeed, I’m sure that’s where I saw that bear rubbing its back against a tree Balou-style before), mixed with old-fashioned archive footage and some home videos, illustrating the proceedings or simply setting a mood.
In this sense, his documentary itself feels very much alive. But what does that mean, ‘alive’?
At first, Kestner and his interviewees seem to approach the subject matter almost randomly. There are interesting bits of information, questions (which in their basic directness – ‘what is life?’ – often surprise the scientists and sometimes reminded me of Werner Herzog’s interview style) and musings, often intriguing, but seemingly haphazard. But slowly a through line begins to present itself. It’s almost like life itself: apparently random movements, changes and developments, slowly building up to something which, at least in retrospect, looks like it had a plan all along.
It’s that same ‘randomness’ that existentially bothers Kestner, but he still hopes that science can provide answers. Some scientists share his concern, suggesting we may simply lack the right sensory apparatus to realise there are indeed higher intelligences observing us. But other scientists are quite content with simply seeing life as a ‘driving force’, or perhaps a ‘life force’, rather than a teleological one. Just as Kestner began his documentary driven by a question, without knowing what the answers would turn out to be.
One solution that slowly emerges, at least in my mind, to his question about existential loneliness is not a teleological ‘God’ (although that hypothesis is mentioned once or twice) but a science-compatible ‘connection’. If you’re looking at one individual life, you’re not seeing the full picture, as one scientist stresses.
And that connection is not just with other humans – we see a mother and her baby being brain-scanned in a research lab as they play – but also with animals (we meet Charles Foster, famous for mimicking the lives of animals like a fox and a beaver) and even with trees and plants, which according to modern science can sense, react and communicate as well. Even the non-organic world is included in this story. Our whole world, explains one scientist, is a delicate balance between organic and geological layers. Not much has to happen – the warning about the climate crisis remains implicit – for our Earth to become inhospitable to all life, not just our own.
And then those microbes: we crush microbes all the time as we walk around, says one scientist – there is no conceivable way we could cherish an ‘individual’ microbe’s life. But taken as a whole, another scientist adds, I would save the microbes above all other species. Because without them, all the life forms on Earth we do cherish would disappear very quickly.
This elegantly circles back to Kestner’s investigation of the giraffe euthanasia mentioned in the beginning, where activists who wanted to save this ‘individual’ and who, in response to the zoo’s announcement, paradoxically started sending death threats (even the feared Chechen leader Kadyrov joined the media frenzy, showing his softer side by offering the animal a safe haven), were confronted with the ‘collective’ logic of the zoo’s leadership. The continued existence of the animal (which socially was at an age when it had to leave its parents to avoid in-fighting, with no partner zoo being able to take it in) simply wasn’t necessary for the gene pool.
Are we individuals? Yes. And are the microbes part of ‘us’? I would again say ‘yes.’ In this sense, we are never alone: each individual is itself a community. Just as we, including our microbes, are part of larger communities, including other people, animals, plants and even geological strata. Death, seen this way, is not just an inevitable, sad part of our individual lives, it’s also a necessary and therefore joyous part of the continued existence of life in general.
Life which, somewhere down the line from us, via the giraffes, to the microbes, loses its ‘individual’ sanctity – at least in human eyes. But where? That’s food for thought and, hopefully, for another intelligent, joyful documentary by Max Kestner.
Denmark/Sweden/United Kingdom, 2024, 100 minutes
Director Max Kestner
Production Bullitt Film
Producer Vibeke Vogel
International sales DR Sales
Script Max Kestner
Cinematography Jacob Sofussen, Maria von Hausswolff, Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, Emil Aaglund, Masafumi Seki, Noah Collier, Max Kestner
Editing Michael Aaglund
Sound design Gustaf Berger
Sound Anne Gry Friis Kristensen
Music Maxwell Sterling
With Bengt Holst, Charles Foster, Michael Levin, Karen Lloyd, Eske Willerslev, Ingrid Newkirk, Sam Wass, Donato Giovannelli, Claus Hjelmbak, Mads Frost Bertelsen
