Homo Sapiens

The images could be taken from a science-fiction film set on planet Earth after it’s become uninhabitable. Abandoned buildings – housing estates, shops, cinemas, schools, amusement parks and prisons. Places being reclaimed by nature, such as a moss-covered bar with ferns growing between the stools, a still-stocked soft drinks machine now covered with vegetation, an overgrown rubbish dump, or tanks in the forest. All these locations carry the traces of erstwhile human existence and bear witness to a civilization that brought forth architecture, art, the entertainment industry, technologies, ideologies, wars and environmental disasters. In precisely framed wide shots, nikolaus Geyrhalter’s static camera shows us the present post-apocalypse. There are no people in his film, and yet – as the title pointedly suggests – he has his eye on nothing less than the future of humanity. (Berlinale Forum)

In the presence of Nikolaus Geyrhalter and members of the film crew.