The Social Dilemma/Netflix The Social Dilemma (2020) The Sundance Film Festival bestowed Jones with a special jury award for emerging film-makers, and Lighthouse International Film Festival gave it the prize for Best Feature-Length Documentary. Not long after, presidential hopeful Donald Trump briefly adopted Pepe as his online mascot and the Anti-Defamation League added the frog to its hate symbol register.įeels Good Man, with its goofy animations and road-tripping – Furie frantically tries to redeem his creation however possible, fan by fan if he has to – is as disorientating and terrifying as the story it sets out to tell. Extremists on social networks Reddit and 4Chan got in on the action: here was a meme they could use, “feeling good” about everything from rape to Auschwitz, and all under cover of a supposed “joke”. They emerged two years later, somewhat wiser, certainly thinner and extremely defensive about their experiment, conceived as a spectacular means of raising environmental awareness, and now mired in financial and scientific controversy.īut in 2014, when popstar Katy Perry featured his green grin on her Twitter feed, some of Pepe’s fans started giving him KKK hoods and Hitler moustaches in an effort to frighten off the mainstream. The experiment, masterminded by ebullient writer and ecologist John Allen, and bankrolled by billionaire Ed Bass, involved eight people entering a giant dome in Oracle, Arizona, on 26 September 1991 and locking the door behind them, to see if they could survive in an hermetically sealed, self-designed ecosystem.
An entire episode of this short series is devoted to wildlife in cities because, like it or not, that is where a lot of creatures live now – or try to.ĭirector Matt Wolf draws on an impressive archive of never-before-seen footage to recount the oft-told (and oft-misrepresented) tale of Biosphere 2, the pride and joy of an ambitious experimental theatre troupe from San Francisco called the Theater of All Possibilities. Yet it isn’t all pretty pictures – along with the new kit comes a new way of thinking. One cameraman discovered that Peruvian vampire bats, distracted from their pursuit of fur seal pups, are more than happy to snack on naturalists. The show contains more than enough tales of daring to satisfy traditionalists. Night on Earth’s digital clean-up of regular night-vision footage has to be seen to be believed. The treetops of Argentina are lit up with infrared light to capture the nocturnal lives of owl monkeys.
It was created using new models of low-light devices that film in full colour and with razor-sharp clarity by moonlight. Made up of 60 separate shoots over one year in 30 different countries, the show does much more than fill in the gaps left by the Planet Earth crew.