Synopsis
From where can we rethink our world to transform it? Philippe Descola has devoted his life as an anthropologist to studying how humans compose their worlds; starting in the Amazon, he turned his field of research towards Europe, in order to understand how we, the moderns, could have made the earth less and less habitable. The film takes him to embody his ideas, in dialogue with the non-humans all around us, in the heart of a unique societal experiment, in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France. There, on and with the land saved from concrete, in place of a pharaonic airport, a new composition of the world is unfolding.
A word from Tënk
If certain documentaries can transform our ways of seeing the world(s), the film Composing Worlds clearly follows suit because of the concepts, conceptions and "sensitive" experiences that are re-presented.
As an anthropologist, Philippe Descola embodies in many ways a renewal of anthropological thought through an invitation to re-consider the ecology of our relationships. He lent himself to the game of this filming, delivering pieces of his thought to Eliza Levy, who put it in resonance with a contemporary Western experience: that of the ZAD (Zone à Défendre) of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France. This community builds in a very singular way, a communal project of life ecologizing its agricultural practices and its relationships with the living.
It is thus from the awareness of the elements that structure our insensitivities and discontinuities that we can free ourselves from them. Descola calls "naturalism", this modern cultural matrix that has become a powerful political operator of destruction.
Composing Worlds intertwines concepts and experiences and opens up a constructive, optimistic and peaceful path of human reflexivity in order to provoke new alternatives for conceiving worlds.
Point of view documentary is a zone to defend!
Sylvie Lapointe
Filmmaker
