ANTHROPOCENE grabs $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award
By Bruce Demara | Toronto Star ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch, a film that chronicles humankind’s devastating impact on the environment, has been awarded the $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award by the Toronto Film Critics Association. The award, the biggest annual prize in Canadian cinema, was given to filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier at the association’s…
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Show, don’t tell Beautiful environmental documentary opts for powerful visuals over facts and figures
By Alison Gilmor | Winnipeg Free Press The saturated colours, the rhythmic patterns, the sublime scale: Seen through the estheticizing lens of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, open-pit mines, mineral evaporation ponds and oil refineries take on a strange dystopian beauty. It’s disturbing that environmental devastation should be so stunning, but that’s the controversial paradox at the…
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Edward Burtynsky Depicts Our Alien Domain
By Louis Bury | Hyperallergic The power of Edward Burtynsky’s landscape photographs is undeniable. Their sweeping aerial perspectives are shot in a style that verges on abstraction without losing their figurative referent. The breathtaking, large-scale images depict landscapes altered and scarred by human industry and development. The stepped terraces and switchback roads of a dusty, Mars-red…
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Stirring Images of Our Impact on the Environment
By Amy Brady | Hyperallergic TORONTO — Standing in a spacious gallery at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, I held back tears as I watched piles of confiscated elephant tusks go up in flames. The moment had been captured by filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. The poignant short film is as…
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Anthropocene Gets Exclusive 4K Engagement on iTunes
By Lauren Malyk | Playback Distributed by Mongrel Media, the hit doc will be available for a limited time in a premium format ahead of its Sundance screening. Read more: http://playbackonline.ca/2018/12/19/anthropocene-gets-exclusive-4k-engagement-on-itunes/#ixzz5a9UKSeSi
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[PRESS RELEASE] TORONTO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES 2018 AWARDS
ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch, Ava and Maison du bonheur compete for Rogers $100,000 Best Canadian Film Award Read the full press release here.
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‘It’s emotional. It’s visceral’: Jennifer Baichwal on the power of art to open up consciousness
CBC Arts At AGO Creative Minds, the Anthropocene director spoke about how art can help us survive in a time of climate Jennifer Baichwal’s Anthropocene project — a film and exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario created with Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier — is an arresting look at how humans are leaving a terrifying signature on the…
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TIFF’s Top 10 Canadian Films names ‘Anthropocene’, Haida-language feature
CTV News TORONTO — A documentary about humanity’s impact on the Earth and a feature shot in the Haida language are among TIFF’s top 10 Canadian features of the year. The organization that runs the Toronto International Film Festival released its Top Ten lists of features and shorts of 2018. View the full list for…
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Aerial Photographs Convey Humanity’s Devastating Effects on Nature
By Lev Feigin | Hyperallergic “If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end,” wrote the novelist W.G. Sebald in Rings of Saturn. From the window of a plane above an urban sprawl, we witness among geometries of rooftops, factories, and…
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Anthropocene art installation explores human impact on the environment
CBC News: The National Three artists have made it their mission to put humanity’s impact on the environment on display. CBC’s Adrienne Arsenault spoke to the artists to discuss Anthropocene, the documentary and multimedia exhibit. Watch the segment here.
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Creative Minds: As the climate teeters on the edge, can art help us survive?
CBC Arts Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Jennifer Baichwal, Brian Jungen and Tanya Talaga discuss art amid ecosystem collapse Our planet is reaching a tipping point. As global temperatures rise, the effects of climate change are accelerating around us. From melting polar ice caps to deadly storms to catastrophic floods to raging wildfires, the world is…
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See the Anthropocene on the Great Lakes
By Krystyn Tully | Great Lakes Guide The planet around you is changing. It’s happening quickly, and it’s happening in dramatic ways. From the land we walk on to the waters we drink, your earth today is very different from your grandparents’ Earth. People have altered the Earth in such profound, lasting ways that scientists say…
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The Anthropocene—Coming Soon to a Theater (and Museum, and Bookshelf) Near You
By Clara Chaisson | OnEarth Anthropocene is a clunky word for an even more unwieldy concept. But props to the Merriam-Webster team who have given us a dictionary definition that’s easy enough to follow. Anthropocene: (n.) The period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age. Try to…
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The Sundance Film Festival’s anticipated premieres include the Canadian documentary Anthropocene and a making-of doc about Alien
By Peter Howell | Toronto Star The 2019 Sundance Film Festival will take moviegoers from the Earth to the moon and to the deepest part of space where no one can hear you scream. Robert Redford’s annual independent film showcase in Park City, Utah, running Jan. 24 to Feb. 3, could be called a “Triple A”…
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A review of documentary film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
By Suresh Nellikode | MeriNews We’re living, living precariously, sometimes, hopelessly too! The stunning images and shocking ironies in connection with human inflicted realities make this documentary film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, a memorable one. A beautiful film with unbelievable examples of human greed without any concerns of life the posterity is going to face. The overweening and…
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The Art Gallery of Ontario puts human destruction on display and calls for change
By Fatima Syed | National Observer When you first walk into the Anthropocene exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, you stop to watch a man with mismatched boots trudging slowly over a 50-year-old landfill just outside Nairobi, Kenya that was declared full in 2001 and shut down. You watch the man walk through what looks…
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Edward Burtynsky – An earthen canvas.
By Deirdre Kelly | Nuvo Magazine Edward Burtynsky has made his name standing behind the lens. But today he is out front and in focus as the man who would save us from ourselves. It’s mid-morning at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and as the Canadian master photographer strolls through The Anthropocene Project, the acclaimed multidisciplinary exhibition combining…
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Art and the Environment: Museums Adjust to a New Climate
By Greg Morrison | Sotheby’s Museum Network “We cannot take action together on something we don’t discuss,” says Miranda Massie, director of New York’s Climate Museum. She’s referring to the fact that although 65% of Americans purport to be anxious about climate change, only about 5% speak about it. Her institution, founded in 2015, is working…
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Edward Burtynsky & The Big Picture
By Holly Hughes | PDNOnline Edward Burtynsky thinks big. Since the 1980s, he has been making large-format images of the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and the impact of these vast operations on the environment. His latest project is his most ambitious to date. In two exhibitions on view now at the National Gallery of Canada in Toronto…
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The Visual Language of Documentary Film: In Conversation with Jennifer Baichwal
By Amy Anderson | BeatRoute Canadian filmmaking trio Jennifer Baichwal, Nick de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky recently completed a trilogy of films that chronicle human impact upon the planet. Their most recent film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, identifies a new era in which human influence is the most dominate factor determining the Earth’s form. The…
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PODCAST: Ep. 3 – Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
TVO Podcasts “There’s no black and white here… there’s no easy answer to this dilemma we find ourselves in of tipping the Earth outside its natural limits.” — Jennifer Baichwal The team behind Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark is back with a new film that explores the ways human activity has fundamentally changed the planet. Colin sat down with filmmakers…
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Review – Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
By Gideon Forman | Alternatives Journal To watch Anthropocene is to be saddened and overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by our remaking of the Earth’s surface through extractive industries; by the destruction of living creatures on land and at sea; and by the injury inflicted on humans, especially the poor, as they participate in these processes. Earlier societies harnessed and harmed…
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Landmark Moment: We have our own geologic period. But it’s nothing to be proud of
By Jorge Ignacio Castillo | Planet S Magazine Anthropocene: The Human Epoch Roxy Theatre Opens Friday 26 Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is more than a film. It’s part of a larger project that includes art exhibitions, virtual and augmented reality, a coffee table book with photographs and essays by filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicolas de…
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The Artist Capturing How Industry is Transforming the Natural World
By Alexander Hawkins | AnOther Magazine “Beauty” is not a word Edward Burtynsky wants associated with his large-format photographs of breathtaking industrial landscapes. Nevertheless, the Canadian photographer has been accused of aestheticising disaster. For almost 40 years, Burtynsky’s unsettling work has taken a bird’s-eye-view on how industry is spectacularly transforming nature, and our world. His interest, he insists,…
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People vs the Planet
By Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier | The Walrus Forests are indispensable to life on this planet. Nearly 1.6 billion people rely on them as sources of food, income, or shelter. Humans have altered over 75 percent of ice-free land on the planet with agriculture, mining, urbanization, and industrialization. And around half of the…
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Edward Burtynsky surveys the devastating scale of man’s footprint on the planet
By Tom Seymour | Wallpaper* he Anthropocene photographs are huge, imposing and impossibly detailed, designed to stimulate in us a sense of awe – both of the beauty of the natural world, and the destruction our species has wrought upon it. They are images, the photographer says, ‘of a predator species run amok’. But few realise how personal…
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The devastating environmental impact of human progress like you’ve never seen it before
By Nicola Davidson | WIRED UK In 1976, when he was a first-year student of photography at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, in Toronto, Edward Burtynsky was given an assignment that would come to shape his working life. Instructed to go out and photograph “evidence of man”, he initially thought of ruins. What better evidence of man’s passing…
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The Anthropocene Project
By Bel Jacobs | HowNow Magazine In face of current environmental events, debate around whether or not mankind now exists in the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human are the single most defining force on the planet and introduced in 2000 by chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Jozef Crutzen- seems to akin to re-arranging…
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“The Idea is to Raise People’s Awareness of Issues” – an Interview with Andrea Kunard, Curator of Anthropocene
By Anna Savitskaya Artdependence Magazine Two simultaneous, complementary exhibitions of Anthropocene opened on September 28th at the National Gallery of Canada (NCG) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The website dedicated to the exhibition defines Anthropocene as the current proposed geological epoch, in which humans are the primary cause of permanent planetary change. Three major artists: world-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky and multiple…
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The photographer sizing up the planet’s human footprint
By Leslie Hook Financial Times The word “ Anthropocene” first entered popular use about 20 years ago as scientists looked for a way to describe a new geologic era, one defined by the impact of humans. Earlier eras have been linked to climatic shifts caused by asteroids or ice ages, but now it is human…
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