Homo sapiens

Oct 19 2016 Not Rated 1h 34m
Documentary

HOMO SAPIENS is visionary documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter's exploration of the finiteness and fragility of human existence, the end of the industrial age, and what it means to be a human being. What will remain of our lives after we're gone? Empty spaces, ruins, cities, increasingly overgrown with vegetation, crumbling asphalt: the areas we currently inhabit, now abandoned and decaying, gradually reclaimed by nature. Comprised of a succession of eerily depopulated, dystopian landscapes from across the world, HOMO SAPIENS offers an at once mesmerizing and chilling vision of what a posthuman future might look like.

Official Trailer
Plot

The images could be taken from a science fiction film set on planet Earth after it's become uninhabitable. Abandoned buildings - housing estates, shops, cinemas, hospitals, offices, schools, a library, amusement parks and prisons. Places and areas being reclaimed by nature, such as a moss-covered bar with ferns growing between the stools, a still stocked soft drinks machine now covered with vegetation, an overgrown rubbish dump, or tanks in the forest. Tall grass sprouts from cracks in the asphalt. Birds circle in the dome of a decommissioned reactor, a gust of wind makes window blinds clatter or scraps of paper float around, the noise of the rain: sounds entirely without words, plenty of room for contemplation. All these locations carry the traces of erstwhile human existence and bear witness to a civilisation that brought forth architecture, art, the entertainment industry, technologies, ideologies, wars and environmental disasters.

Written by

Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Abir Ahmed

Directed by

Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Cast

N/A

Crew

View crew

Production Countries

Austria

Production Companies

Filmfonds Wien, 3sat, ZDF, ORF, Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion

Languages

Deutsch

Awards

2 nominations

Trailers
HOMO SAPIENS Trailer engl.
Scores
# of Votes
1,113
Average Rating
7 out of 10
Metascore
84
Popularity
NA