Our planet is turning into a wasteland: we are very close to exhausting our moral, social and other resources. Small things can be read as major warning signs. “Flood” experiments with scale and acoustic effects. The “canyons” are actually traces of brutal excavation only 1–2 metres high. The raw footage was shot in a huge sand quarry near Tallinn, Estonia, formerly a popular recreational area for city residents. Sold off by greedy politicians, this beautiful place was brutally exploited for excessive sand extraction and transformed into a lifeless wasteland. Filmed from extremely low camera positions. Edited as minimalist still-life landscape images. Combined with a dramatic sky panorama and echoes of agonised screams from the quarry’s iron monsters, an imminent cataclysm is foretold by the approach of rain and thunderstorms.

A note on the film’s aesthetics. In his foundational text Water and Dreams (1942), French philosopher Gaston Bachelard distinguishes between formal imagination and material imagination. Material imagination refers to primordial alarm sounds and elementary visual forms: the basis of what could be called an “eyeball-skinned” aesthetics in documentary cinema.