Synopsis
Donna Haraway is a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology, a feminist, and a science-fiction enthusiast who works at building a bridge between science and fiction. She became known in the 1980s through her work on gender, identity, and technology, which broke with the prevailing trends and opened the door to a frank and cheerful trans species feminism. Brussels filmmaker Fabrizio Terranova visited Donna Haraway at her home in California, living with her – almost literally, for a few weeks, and there produced a quirky film portrait. Terranova allowed Haraway to speak in her own environment, using attractive staging that emphasised the playful, cerebral sensitivity of the scientist. The result is a rare, candid, intellectual portrait of a highly original thinker.
A word from Tënk
It's all in the title: Story Telling for Earthly Survival! Nothing less. The human species needs new narratives that not only oppose declinist discourses, but broaden the spectrum of possible experiences! Domestic companions, microbiota, plants, aliens, all the existing ones can and must be associated to these new configurations of life to be invented. It is a real call to insurrection that Haraway defends (while a jellyfish slides down her back): "There is a little time left, not much, to revolt. We must mobilize for some worlds, and against others."
The film embraces this radicalism by immersing us in an uncertain world, full of cosmic mystery and visual paradoxes - drawing a universe where the boundaries between reality and (science-)fiction would be more porous and the energy of thought less constrained by imposed categories.
Electrified by the humor and vivacity of its protagonist, the film is both a counterpoint and an antidote - subversive, generous, disturbing, in a word lively - to the reactionary and debilitating thinking that colonizes our airwaves.
Arnaud Lambert
Filmmaker
