Light Needs – 2024

Thursday, April 11, 3:15 PM

Light Needs
Director: Jesse McLean, Documentary, USA, 72 min
Light Needs is an experimental documentary about houseplants who cohabitate with people and the surprisingly intimate and complex relationships that can develop between them.

Containing footage collected from many different domestic and professional spaces over several years, each home/site evidences the different ways people cohabitate with and relate to plants. Yet, this film is ardently not a document of houseplants but rather a consideration of the benefits and losses accrued through the social contracts between plant and animal. By directly attending to the relationships humans have with nonhumans, Light Needs looks to shine a light on the responsibility for care towards other living beings.

Screens with:

Plants of Power
Directors: César Rojas Ángel, Chris Ehrmann, Documentary, Colombia, 24 min
After the decades-long war on drugs fractured much of Colombia, Liliana Pechene Muelas, an Indigenous woman, struggles to heal the broken relationship between medicinal plants, like cannabis and coca, and her community.