Welsh actress — and instantly recognisable voice of countless nature documentaries — Siân Phillips narrates this cheeky and playful examination of the human-driven Anthropocene from an unlikely starting point: stones. Named for an at-home treatment for kidney stones, Belgian writer-director Sofie Benoot’s Apple Cider Vinegar joins a body of exploratory essay films that seek to critically examine the world around us through its less-noticed aspects. The film premiered in Visions du Réel‘s International Competition earlier this year and is now at DokuFest.
The rise of the Anthropocene
«Anthropocene» is a term that refers to a non-formalised era marked by extensive human impact, popularised by climate scientists in the 1980s. While major scientific bodies have recently rejected its inclusion as an official epoch mainly due to a lack of sedimentary record, the concept remains a buzzword that points to the drastic anthropogenic impact on the Earth. This includes but is not limited to climate change, which is tied to massive ecological damage and rapid transformation of naturally occurring ecosystems. Notably, the lowering of species survival rates and immense disruption of habitats has led to changes that humans rarely notice as they may not affect their day-to-day lives — and perhaps only noticed when they stop to look around them.
An interconnected world
Apple Cider Vinegar bears similarities to winding, networked essay films like Lea Hartlaub’s giraffe-centric documentary Sr but is less dense and more accessible, made possible in large part by Benoot’s choice of narration device. Although the screenplay is by Benoot, Phillips narrates with a conversational and friendly tone in the first person, beginning the film with an anecdote about a kidney stone she passed containing weddelite, a mineral form found most often in the Weddell Sea off of Antarctica. Benoot uses the same disembodied narrator voice both diegetically and non-diegetically, making it feel like the audience is directly there with Phillips as she talks about nature with subjects around the world.
the lowering of species survival rates and immense disruption of habitats has led to changes that humans rarely notice as they may not affect their day-to-day lives
The film’s smattering of subjects is as eclectic as they are interesting: for instance, we first meet Charlotte, who interprets pain in different areas of her body as corresponding to to-be tectonic events around the world. Then, we meet Rob, an artist who gathers «stones» of plastic waste from the beaches of Cornwall to craft sculptures shaped like the Rapa Nui Moai.
The filmmaker smoothly peppers in her gently sentimental message about the human-instigated destruction of nature, seen through the disappearance of animals and barren landscapes caught on multiple sets of wildlife cameras — another creative directorial inclusion. «We had to travel further out to be able to show you the tightly woven tale called ‘nature’,» says Phillips, referring to the tangible absence of non-human animals when a camera strays across a landscape. Slowly but surely, Apple Cider Vinegar uses stones and rocks as a metaphor in which humans seek to cover up fault lines, literally and symbolically, while small groups of individuals struggle to keep human intervention in nature visible.
