A film by Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser. Filmmakers will be present via Zoom for a post-screening Q+A.

Within the human struggle to live and work on a changing planet, questions of value, extraction, and adaptation echo across seemingly disparate worlds. "A Common Sequence" examines shifts of life and labor through a critically-endangered salamander and plant patents in the apple industry. Weaving the stories of Dominican nuns running a conservation lab, a group of fisherman attempting to live off of a depleting lake, engineers developing AI-driven harvesting machines, and an indigenous biomedical researcher resisting the commodification of human DNA, the film becomes a meditation on the shifting border between the natural and unnatural world, and the dynamics of power at play. Clark and Gibisser extrapolate a foreboding vision of humanity’s future on earth, where the commons (resources shared by all) seem to be receding as swiftly and imperceptibly as our coastal shorelines. Woven with coolly framed images and carefully layered sounds, and edited with Hitchcockian suspense, "A Common Sequence" is a richly generative, open-ended experience from two of the most exciting filmmakers at work today.

Location: Critical Media Lab, Peterson Hall, Room 108.