light of temptation (2018)

Harald

Harald is a wrestler. Driven by his ambitious mother he won a vast number of challenge cups. But his true love is flowers. When his favorite is taken away by his mother one day, he has to fight for it.

The Professor

A nutty professor meets a very hungry caterpillar in this animated chase cartoon brimming with swinging 60s backdrops.

Ossigeno

Lena is nine-year-old. One day, she spontaneously makes an act of love that will change her life. She will take care of a plant. An action so simple yet unusual that nowadays only children could instinctively do. Will this revolutionary gesture change the future of our world? In a blurry society made by technological progress and innovation, can a simple action become a revolution?

Las plantas también mueren

Inside a room full of plants, a woman finds shelter from the outside world. Submerged in delirium, Alba experiences her withering.

There are things in this world that are yet to be named

"There are things in this world that are yet to be named" centers around Solanum plastisexum - an Australian tomato whose sexual expression is unpredictable and unstable, challenging even the fluid norms of the plant kingdom. Footage of the team of botanists who recently used their Solanum research to explode notions of sexual normativity in any plant or animal is combined with a voiceover of letters sent between science writer Rachel Carson and her lover Dorothy Freeman. "There are things in this world that are yet to be named" is a meditation on erasure, indefinability, and the intersection of queer and environmental histories.

Eating You Alive

How and why what we eat is the cause of the chronic diseases that are killing us, and changing what we eat can save our lives one bite at a time.

Little Eve Edgarton

Eve Edgarton decides to devote her life solely to her love of botany, but unexpectedly falls in love with a man who shares none of her intellectual interests.

Bosco

Three filmmakers bring back images of the forest. They are reworked and destructured with the means of the photochemical laboratory. BOSCO is a visual breakthrough punctuated by a contrasted and hypnotic black and white.

Flora

In 1929, an expedition of university botanists enter an uncharted forest where they discover, and must escape an ancient organism.

Ile Alatau

A story of four childhood friends who mysteriously disappeared while camping in the rural mountains of Trans Ili Alatau. The following events were recorded on Sultan's videocamera, who was making his student thesis project on a local plant called the Asafoetida.

The Botany of Desire

Featuring Michael Pollan and based on his best-selling book, this special takes viewers on an exploration of the human relationship with the plant world — seen from the plants' point of view. Narrated by Frances McDormand, the program shows how four familiar species — the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato — evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication.

Brenda and Billy and the Pothos Plant

Two estranged siblings, a botanist and a magician, come together to try and raise their mother’s body from the dead.

Bad Boy of Bonsai

Bad Boy of Bonsai is an experimental art-house documentary that focuses on Guy Guidry, a Louisiana local, and his passion for bonsai.

Restart the Earth

When a drug to replicate plant cells creates a sentient form of flower, the planet is over taken by flora and humankind is depleted. A Chinese task force, a widowed father and his young daughter fight to survive in a mission to inject an antidote to the core of the plants to reverse their growth.

Evergreen Love

Sayaka works at a office. She's not very good at her job or with love. One night, she finds a man, Itsuki, collapsed in front of her home. She takes him inside and they begin to live together. Itsuki teaches Sayaka about cooking wild herbs and collecting wild herbs, but he has a secret.

The Secret Life of Plants

A documentary about the study of plant sentience with original music by Stevie Wonder. Utilizing time-lapse photography, the film proposes that plants are able to experience emotions and communicate with the world around them.

Wilting of the Blood Orchid

Akil, a wealthy butchery mogul, has a very close relationship with his younger brother, Sharm. When Sharm is tragically murdered all signs point to Akil's wife, Madison. With no actual proof Akil turns to alcohol and unleashes his rage on his wife. Madison plots revenge on Akil by creating a poison from her repertoire of poisonous botany, the most lethal: The Blood Orchid. Domestic rivalry ensues in this gripping psychological drama.

Your Humble Servant

Film follows Haide and Toomas, husband and wife in life and in art Piip and Tuut through the hard work of the creation of their new clown show in the Botanical Garden of Tallinn, showing the intensity and poetry behind their craft and focusing on their collaboration on stage and in life.

Tea War: The Adventures of Robert Fortune

In the 19th century, China held the monopoly on tea, which was dear and fashionable in the West, and the British Empire exchanged poppies, produced in its Indian colonies and transformed into opium, for Chinese tea. Inundated by the drugs, China was forced to open up its market, and the British consolidated their commercial dominance. In 1839, the Middle Empire introduced prohibition. The Opium War was declared… Great Britain emerged as the winner, but the warning was heeded: it could no longer depend on Chinese tea. The only alternative possible was to produce its own tea. The East India Company therefore entrusted one man with finding the secrets of the precious beverage. His mission was to develop the first plantations in Britain’s Indian colonies. This latter-day James Bond was called Robert Fortune – a botanist. After overcoming innumerable ordeals in the heart of imperial China, he brought back the plants and techniques that gave rise to Darjeeling tea.

The Inner Life of Exterior Plants

Within a banana plantation and a botanic garden, a panel of botanic experts are challenged to discuss contemporary trends in gardening, scientific classification, and monocultural crops by an astute interviewer. The hidden politics of the experts’ positions are uncomfortably exposed and confronted with reality, as they render themselves suspicious of their own language.

Mori, The Artist's Habitat

In 1974, Morikazu is 94 years old and his wife Hideko is 76 years old. They live at a house in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. The garden at their home is full of trees, plants and insects. Morikazu paints pictures of the creatures in his garden and also observes them. This has been his daily routine for more than 30 years. Morikazu and Hideko entertain visitors every day including a photographer and the couple living next door.

Plants And Nothing Else

Short film showing plants and a scene with a lonely dog

On Closer Inspection

"Without leaving his own garden, a man may know the world" - an abstract study of the wildlife found in every garden.

The Magical World of Moss

They have no roots, no seeds, no flowers, but mosses show immense survival capacities and can suspend their biological activity for long periods. Today, researchers are exploring the exceptional resistance of these archaic organisms. British ecologists have even resurrected a "zombie" moss that has been trapped in the permafrost for 1,500 years. Associated with decay and disliked in Europe, mosses are deified in Japan. With 25,000 species worldwide, bryophytes - their scientific name - are the seat of real ecosystems, and can develop in inhospitable landscapes, through an extravagant reproduction cycle.

Algorithms of Beauty

In 1772, Englishwoman Mary Delany wrote to her niece: “I have found a new way of imitating flowers.” The imitation in question was the art form called decoupage, based on cut-outs and reshuffling of pictures. The charm and botanical precision of these works attracts attention of even today’s artists, among others by an anonymous programmer who is trying to invent a way of capturing the flowers’ vivacity in pictures. With this aim in mind, she has created an algorithm, which would combine science and beauty, similarly to Delaney’s efforts, whose illustrations it is meant to animate.

Late Anthropocene

Hand processed expired Kodak 7291, Camera: Beaulieu R16, Lens: Angenieux 12-120mm with +3 Diopter, Polarising filter for the clouds. Hand processed in C-41 chem using a Lomo UPB-1A tank. Still haven't mastered removal of the rem-jet anti-halation layer (thats all the white 'static' on the film). The film expired about 40 years ago.

Kudzu

A climbing, coiling, trailing vine. Inescapable growth. It smothers that which it climbs.

The Mirrored Message

This experimental film follows the work of two scientists who test a new device that uses specialized circuitry to transfer data between computer networks and living plants. Neither science nor fiction, this documentary highlights the human labor of scientific procedures, attentive to the future they are producing – in which humans will disappear.

Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici

Modern nocturnal melodrama by Andrea Zingoni.

Larry and Steve

A dog is adopted by a moron, and is taken to the store to go shopping.

The Citrillo's Turn

1903, before the Revolution… The Citrillo’s Turns is a pulque bar in Mexico City, in which beings with no present or future gather to drink their lives away and tell stories of the dead and apparitions. Thus is woven a story of real passions –love, betrayal, jealousy, pillage- in an atmosphere of drunkenness and hallucination.

Agent F.O.X.

Super spy and master inventor Agent F.O.X. arrives in Carrot Town with one objective: infiltrate the community of friendly rabbits, locate a mysterious artifact, and return to base immediately. But the mission is turned on its head when the secret agent is discovered... and mistaken for a distant cousin: a long-tailed rabbit. Overwhelmed by their hospitality and friendship, Long Tail is forced to make a difficult choice: abandon his mission or betray his newfound friends. He soon discovers that he is part of a dangerous plot that could threaten the peace between the two animal groups forever. Agent F.O.X. is a high octane animated adventure with lots of laughs, zany action, and a heartwarming story the entire family will enjoy.

The Enchanted

Royce returns home to the backwoods of Florida to look after a house that was once his late father's. At first welcomed back by longtime family friend Booker, Royce later falls in love with a mysterious woman from a strange family that Booker has warned him against getting too close to.

Arion

The story follows Arion, a young man kidnapped by Hades as a child and raised to believe that his mother was blinded by Zeus and that killing the ruler of Mount Olympus will cure her.

Angel on My Shoulder

The Devil arranges for a deceased gangster to return to Earth as a well-respected judge to make up for his previous life.

The Blood of Jesus

Razz accidentally shoots his wife Martha when his hunting rifle drops on the floor and discharges. The church congregation gathers at Martha’s bedside to pray for her recovery, and during this period an angel arrives to take Martha’s spirit from her body, but she is tempted by the slick Judas Green, who is an agent for Satan.

The Reluctant Dragon

Humorist Robert Benchley attempts to find Walt Disney to ask him to adapt a short story about a gentle dragon who would rather recite poetry than be ferocious. Along the way, he is given a tour of Walt Disney Studios, and learns about the animation process.

Twa-Tiu-Tiann

Through a famous painting "South Street Festival", a Taiwanese college boy unexpectedly travels 100 years back in time, back to the 1920's, when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. He is stuck, he panics, he wants to return to 2014 but soon changes his mind, not just because of the prettiest geisha girl in town...

The Wanderer

A stranger comes to a peaceful village bearing gifts that bear a terrible price.

Faraway

Audrey, a determined young American woman, arrives in the Philippines with a mysterious mission, little money, and no chance of success. But when she enlists the help of two friendly locals, Hazel and Rey, and an extremely unfriendly American expatriate, Nick, suddenly the possibility of success comes into view. All they have to do is cross 300 miles of roads, jungles, and ocean, ward off the attacks of a vicious local motorcycle gang, and keep themselves from killing each other. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Bleak Times

Set to a backdrop of desolate snowy mountains, a young boy and his brother stumble into a surreal and twisted journey. Trying to escape their surroundings they are pursued by mysterious figures and have to confront themes of isolation, death and identity.

A Knight in Camelot

Yet another variation on Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur's Court." Here, a computer malfunction causes a science researcher to be sent back in time with her laptop, which she uses to amaze the court.

Angels in the Outfield

Roger is a foster child whose irresponsible father promises to get his act together when Roger's favourite baseball team, the California Angels, wins the pennant. The problem is that the Angels are in last place, so Roger prays for help to turn the team around. Sure enough, his prayers are answered in the form of angel Al.