A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.'s Biscuit Works

An environmental account of Henry Ford’s Amazon experience decades after its failure. The story addressed by the film begins in 1927, when the Ford Motor Company attempted to establish rubber plantations on the Tapajós River, a primary tributary of the Amazon. This film addresses the recent transition from failed rubber to successful soybean cultivation for export, and its implication for land usage.

Fordlandia is a small settlement on the River Tapajos in the Brazilian part of the Amazon, where Henry Ford set up a rubber industry in the 1920s. Mainly due to the resistance of nature, the project failed and was abandoned some 20 years later. Fordlandia is a voyage of (de)colonisation whereby the drifts and detours of modernity in uncertain places are highlighted, turning away from whatever their historical imaginaries were. The tensions between industrial and natural landscape are levelled off in a certain horizontality of hierarchies between form and content, and at the same time the animal resignifies possibilities of the community of the living.

“Shows how a full carload of coal is loaded onto a vessel every thirty seconds at the great Erie Railroad Docks, Cleveland, Ohio. Great clouds of coal dust rise as each car is unloaded.”

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, along with other international organizations, is leading efforts to increase aquaculture by encouraging countries around the world to invest in its development. However, local communities strongly oppose the expansion of fish farms due to resource depletion and water pollution concerns. From Italy to Greece, Spain to Senegal, and all the way to Patagonia in Chile, their journey to uncover the truth extends to the ends of the earth.

Manoel de Oliveira's final work revisits one of his earliest films and celebrates a century of industrialization in Portugal.

Under the sun, the heavenly beauty of grasslands will soon be covered by the raging dust of mines. Facing the ashes and noises caused by heavy mining , the herdsmen have no choice but to leave as the meadow areas dwindle. In the moonlight, iron mines are brightly lit throughout the night. Workers who operate the drilling machines must stay awake. The fight is tortuous, against the machine and against themselves. Meanwhile, coal miners are busy filling trucks with coals. Wearing a coal-dust mask, they become ghostlike creatures. An endless line of trucks will transport all the coals and iron ores to the iron works. There traps another crowd of souls, being baked in hell. In the hospital, time hangs heavy on miners' hands. After decades of breathing coal dust, death is just around the corner. They are living the reality of purgatory, but there will be no paradise.