Extreme close up on a mushroom, glowing softly against the forest floor. Pan down to reveal a tangled underground web. Zoom out to reveal everything.
Max went for a run during a world-stopping pandemic, and had an idea for a world-changing feature film. Now he and his friend Jethro are going to try to pitch it.
Concept for a Film blends radical mycology, vulnerable autobiography and experimental sound and music design in order to explore the fundamental interconnectivity of the world and a human race on the brink of self-induced destruction.
The piece juxtaposes an imagined disaster movie where fungi start fighting back, accounts of Max’s father’s recent Leukaemia diagnosis and his outsourced fungal immune system, magic mushroom trips, explorations of human colonisation, and the creation of a huge sensor-responsive analogue synth made in the form of an underground mycelial network. Drawing from Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, and Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, the piece endeavours to shape itself according to the rules of nature, rather than following a Western patriarchal notion of linear, heroic narrative.
