The Mushroom Speaks

The first organism to grow after the nuclear bombs in Japan was a mushroom. That’s no coincidence; fungi often prove capable of cleaning up humanity’s mess.

This essayistic documentary turns its lens on scientists, thinkers, and mushroom enthusiasts searching in forests or working with petri dishes in the laboratory. All of them praise the versatility and regenerative power of fungi: they purify water, make polluted soil fertile again, and serve as medicine or culinary delicacy.

Interviews and poetic texts are interspersed by images of serene landscapes. Sometimes filmed close to the ground, at mushroom height, sometimes zoomed in even further, in frame-filling close-ups of spores, filaments, reproductive processes, and growth patterns. At a slow pace, a universe unfolds in which everything is interconnected through the vast network of fungi. Similarly, a growing web of advocates emerges for a new era, one in which not destructive humanity but world-saving fungi take center stage. What if we were to listen to the mushroom?