Category: Documentaries

Links to documentaries

Psychedelics: Chemicals, Consciousness, and Creativity

Could psychedelics make you more creative? Shift your mind, connect you to others, and help you access a younger, more malleable version of yourself? Activist Rick Doblin, neuroscientist Gül Dölen, and musician Reggie Watts join Brian Greene for a mind-bending and multidisciplinary conversation about the promises and pitfalls of these “magic” molecules and their impact on creativity, connection, and consciousness.

AlphaGo – The Movie | Full award-winning documentary

With more board configurations than there are atoms in the universe, the ancient Chinese game of Go has long been considered a grand challenge for artificial intelligence.

On March 9, 2016, the worlds of Go and artificial intelligence collided in South Korea for an extraordinary best-of-five-game competition, coined The DeepMind Challenge Match. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched as a legendary Go master took on an unproven AI challenger for the first time in history.

Directed by Greg Kohs and with an original score by Academy Award nominee Hauschka, AlphaGo had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. It has since gone on to win countless awards and near universal praise for a story that chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?

Man Spends 30 Years Turning Degraded Land into Massive Forest – Fools & Dreamers (Full Documentary)

The incredible story of how degraded gorse-infested farmland has been regenerated back into beautiful New Zealand native forest over the course of 30 years.

Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve, on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula, and its kaitiaki/manager of 30 years, botanist Hugh Wilson. When, in 1987, Hugh let the local community know of his plans to allow the introduced ‘weed’ gorse to grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate farmland into native forest, people were not only skeptical but outright angry – the plan was the sort to be expected only of “fools and dreamers”.

Now considered a hero locally and across the country, Hugh oversees 1500 hectares resplendent in native forest, where birds and other wildlife are abundant and 47 known waterfalls are in permanent flow. He has proven without doubt that nature knows best – and that he is no fool.

Into the Soil | The Wisdom of Regenerative Farming | Full Documentary

”A refreshing perspective on what it means to be wealthy” – Don Smith, Kiss the Ground

In the documentary ”Into the Soil” we follow Brigid LeFevre, who runs a community supported agriculture operation (CSO) in Järna, Sweden. In her biodynamic vegetable garden she focuses on fermenting the harvest in order to enrich it with nutritious lactic acid bacteria.

Brigid grew up in an anthroposophically inspired Camphill community in Northern Ireland where volunteers lived and worked together with people with special needs. It was a self-sufficient community where the local store brought in bulk organic produce and each household would write down their purchases – without any actual exchange of money.

Growing up in a place where food was separated from the economic market has had a big impact on Brigid’s philosophy as a farmer. And really, come to think about it, why is it that the global ups and downs of the economy should determine the operating practices of small scale local farms?

In Brigid’s garden it doesn’t. She grows and ferments vegetables for the members, who subscribe to her sauerkraut, kimchi and lacto fermented pickles, all year round. The members support this regenerative agriculture operation with money or hands-on help in the garden.

It’s a local, circular economy, which underpins an alive garden, buzzing and chirping, where the goal isn’t to turn a profit, but rather to make the soil more alive with the passing of each season.

Directed and produced by Mattias Olsson for Campfire Stories. Musical score composed by Arvid Rask. Sound design by Boris Laible and Jonas Källstrand. Financed in part by the Namaste Foundation.