Homo Sapiens, by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, is an exceptional documentary. If you are lucky enough to catch it, you will find yourself looking at footage of abandoned places for 94 minutes straight. Not a dialogue. No soundtrack. Rain dripping through a broken ceiling, a gust of wind blowing papers around a deserted classroom, flapping of wings when a pigeon flies through an empty warehouse, croaking of a frog in an abandoned mall.
The goal is to make us feel what earth will look like once we are gone. We are told nothing about the places we see. Not a hint to why they have been abandoned, letting nature regain its ownership. Nothing about the stories, the tragedies, that forced humans away. That's not the point. It is not about the single place. We are left with the feeling that humanity is gone, forever, from everywhere. Nobody seems to bother. There is no one that could. Wind blows, frog croak. Unperturbed by the lack of us - or because of that - nature goes on with its existence. Waves crashing on the shore, birds shrieking in the sky. Who liked these people anyway?
And yet there is so much of us in the movie. Without seeing a single living person you can still feel our presence. A symbol in a broken congress hall reminds us of wars, tragedies, broken dreams, people chanting at parades, man enchanting the masses at a rally. Computers, servers, a radio antenna pointed at the sky, tell us about our dream to conquer nature, on this world and on others. Cars, magazines, supermarket trollies, a water slide, a swing - tools for our distraction, for entertainment. You cannot miss our uniqueness, our arrogance, our ambition. Only humans bend nature to their will, at least in this visible way. Once gone, we leave a heavy trail of concrete, steel, broken glass and wires everywhere. It looks ugly, but then, no one is there to care about beauty and ugliness.
Out of the screen and into the theatre a second experience unfolds. It doesn't happen that often that a group of us is asked to sit quietly for 94 minutes staring at nature. A few fall asleep. It's Saturday afternoon and we are all tired. My mind is left free to go around. I look at the details on the screen, think of thoughts I wrote above. Think of something else, then back to the screen. Where is this place? What happened to all the people? Time is up, light's on. We sit in silence for a while, aware of our presence like rarely before. We are the master of this world, and then again, after us no one will care.