Maryland, USA
University of Seville, Spain
Grasshoppers have been admired and villainized throughout history. They have experienced significant changes in our world, including those most recently induced by humankind, having to adjust and resist individually and collectively. The film navigates current challenges capitalism has posed on the environment through the lens of this millenary species in rural Maryland. Can grasshoppers show more humanity than humans?
This film explores how the current relations of production and intensive use of land affect the environment through the lenses of grasshoppers, a species that has been around for over 250 million years. The filmmakers start from the idea that our world has a form. Mountains, rivers, trees, and bushes… are the result of thousands of years of evolution. They have grown, adjusted, and mutated. But landscapes would not be without human perception, which has always been conditioned to human needs. People have taken whatever they needed from nature to survive and, in the process, have created a way to understand it. Like many other species, human relationships with the environment have never been peaceful. But it has become more violent as the centuries have gone by, first through capitalism organizing spatial relations (land grabs, imperialism) and in recent times because of world population increasing at a similar pace as greed. The film focuses on this evolution, exposing the contradictions of our actions as a species.