Last Things

Synopsis

Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others: Last Things introduces the geobiosphere as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.

Deborah Stratman takes up a pluralist vision of evolution, where imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning the future, and combines pure science with speculative fiction to weave a visual poem with evocative sounds and texts from writers and thinkers from all ages and sounds, together with landscapes and microscopic photographs that reveal the textures of rocks.

Biography and Films

Deborah Stratman (Washington, D.C., 1967) is a filmmaker and an associate professor in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Much of her work points to the relationships between physical environments and the human power struggles that play out on the land and address ideas of freedom, identity, control, ghosts and faith. Blurring the lines between documentary and experimental filmmaking, she mixes analogue and digital images with archive footage. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA and MoMA PS1, Centre Pompidou, Witte de With and Tabakalera, among many other art centres, and her films have been screened at festivals such as Sundance, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, True/False, Toronto, Locarno and Rotterdam.

She made her Spanish debut in 2002, when In Order Not to Be Here competed in the official section at l’Alternativa, and she has been a festival regular ever since: O’er the Land won Best Documentary in 2009 and The Illinois Parables won a Special Mention in the Feature Film section. In l'Alternativa 2017 she presented a retrospective on her work and led a _{Sonic Rambling} workshop.

Her latest feature, Last Things, is being screened at l'Alternativa 2023 after its world premiere at Sundance and playing at the Berlinale, and The Illinois Parables is also be rescreened this year.

Podcast