Soylent Green

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Eye Filmmuseum

7 February Eye is closed

Eye Filmmuseum seen across the river IJ © Marcus Koppen

Eye Filmmuseum, © Marcus Koppen

campaign image Cinema Ecologica

still from Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, US 1974)

still Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, US 1974)

poster Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, US 1973)

still from Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, US 1973)

still Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, US 1973)

still from Spaceship Earth (Matt Wolf, US 2020)

still Spaceship Earth (Matt Wolf, US 2020)

still from Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, US 1971)

still Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, US 1971)

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exclusiveScreeningsInEye

New York 2022, home to 40 million people subsisting on strange, green rusks is the dystopian setting for director Richard Fleischer. Detective Thorn sets out to find out whether the food corporation genuinely uses plant-based ingredients for Soylent Green?

New York sweats through a permanent heatwave, clean water, soap, vegetables, meat and fruit have become unaffordable except for the super rich in their ritzy apartments. Other New Yorkers are homeless and hungry, subsisting on the strange, factory-produced rusk: Soylent Green.
How vegetarian is this government provided rusk? Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) attempts to find out supported by aging scientist Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson’s last role) and discover the shocking truth …
Soylent Green is a shining example of a societally critical cult film and was screened at countless SF festivals. Fleischer provides an ominous depiction of the now not so distant over-populated future and Big Corp’s machinations. Little civilisation remains when the populace is reduced to fighting for the last scraps of food.

Film directors have used fiction to show how humanity relates to nature, in every genre. Think, for instance, of disaster films, ones about pandemics, underwater creatures that can talk or plant-based life forms who colonise the minds and bodies of earth’s inhabitants.

Cinema Ecologica

Is there hope for humanity? Perhaps, if botanist Freeman Lowell can succeed in keeping the last trees and crops that could be saved alive in greenhouses in space. Douglas Trumbull’s eco science fiction from 1972 became a cult hit with a serious, urgent message.

Botanist Freeman Lowell is flying to the Rings of Saturn in a stolen spaceship, with the last trees and gardens from planet Earth on board. Will he succeed in saving botanical life from Earth?

Silent Running

Was it a foolish hippy experiment, applied biology or art? Eight young adventurers were locked into a hermetically sealed replica of planet earth’s ecosystem, Biosphere 2. The only outside influence, the sun streaming into the dome.

In 1991, eight young ‘biospherians’, followers of charismatic activist John Allen, the pan’s spiritual father, allowed themselves to be locked into a gigantic glass dome. Under it lay various ecosystems, including a tropical rainforest, a tropical ocean with reef, a desert and a savannah featuring hundreds of carefully curated organisms.
For two years, the eight Americans were to conduct scientific experiments and trials aiming to establish which influence humanity has on its environment. Soon however, the group was simply trying to survive: CO2 emissions were rising, the harvests were poor and the experiment didn’t meet scientific standards. After two years the now emaciated, exhausted participants emerged from the biosphere.
Matt Wolf’s documentary is the sober opposite of SF film Silent Running (1971, Douglas Trumbull), in which a botanist in a spaceship puts it all on the line to save the last surviving plants from planet earth. John Allen’s dream was to make other planets inhabitable for humans using biosphere-like domes.

Soylent Green

Richard Fleischer / US, 1973 / 97 min.

New York 2022, home to 40 million people subsisting on strange, green rusks is the dystopian setting for director Richard Fleischer. Detective Thorn sets out to find out whether the food corporation genuinely uses plant-based ingredients for Soylent Green?

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Cinema Ecologica

Why in Eye

“In his final role – he died nine days after shooting wrapped - Edward G. Robinson’s character, an incorruptible, old-school scientist, makes the ultimate sacrifice.” -Anna Abrahams, programmer