Five DocNomads films in FIPADOC, France
Annette Jacob’s HOW TO DOWNLOAD A FOREST, Sebastian Molina Ruiz’ TOTAL LIFE FOREVER, Martin Herr’s OMAMA, Carmen Tofeni’s SWEET AND SALTY and Kait Harlow’s THE SHINING TAPESTRY will be presented in the New Talent competition at FIPADOC – International Film Festival Biarritz held in France between 23 and 31 January.
By Annette Jacob (India) • 19' • 2025
Moving through herbariums and expedition sites in Portugal, the film reveals the Sisyphean task of data collection and knowledge production. Everyday people set out to find a little more about the world and each new information expands our world infinitely. The title gestures toward an impossible task: to categorise and hold the living world within an archive. Driven by preservation, we are challenged by history and forced to admit that something always escapes our systems. How to Download a Forest is a human story and about how small we are. It slowly becomes clear that the world does not need us to know it, but we keep trying anyway.
TODA LA VIDA PARA SIEMPRE
By Sebastián Ruiz Molina (Mexico) • 19' • 2025
An anthology of dreams from people who had to leave their homes only to find themselves in Europe, in a Tower of Babel where no one speaks the same language, and no one understands each other. Here, people walk around lost, meeting each other in their dreams and searching for ways to return home.
By Martin Herr (Hungary) • 17' • 2025
А story of my 88-year-old rural Hungarian grandmother, whose main wish is not to wake up tomorrow. When I, her 30-year-old expatriate grandson, return hoping to reconnect with her, the film unfolds as an intimate yet quirky meditation on resilience and decay, the class gap that divides us, and the care that connects us.
AGRIDOCE
By Carmen Tofeni (Romania) • 16' • 2025
The life of a small coastal community is changing beyond recognition. At least that’s how it seems to an old fisherman, as he watches the dire consequences of climate change on his long-standing source of livelihood. For the filmmaker, the disappearance of the seahorse – nature’s litmus test for clean water – becomes a symbol of humanity’s destructive activity.
By Kait Harlow (USA) • 28' • 2025
A family of wild owls experiences the springtime: hunting, feeding, raising their young. A camera in their nest captures their every move. While a community of online viewers monitor the owls 24/7 via livestream, a strange story begins to unfold, calling into question the paradigm of control that underpins our human interventions into the non-human realm.