State of Affairs

Based on Ronald Wright's bestselling book A Short History of Progress, this documentary provides a subversive diagnosis of mankind's unique abilities and the danger they've brought to the world. The film opens with a suggestive scene of primates performing elementary human tasks for a simple reward of fruit, and directors Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks focus on the crucial differences and similarities between our genetic forbears and us. Unlike them, we have, as a behavioural scientist puts it, the ability to 'probe for unobservable phenomenon to explain the observable.' This is the key to science, philosophy, mechanics, industrialization and the rest of our 'progress.' But like the apes, we are defined by primeval impulses that, when married to our unique intelligence, can produce disastrous results. Climate change, brutal depletion of natural resources, economic inequality and an alienation from the natural world--is the price of our native intelligence too high?