Juan Arturo García

When an atomic clock lags for 1 second –an event that happens once every 30 million years– two characters start hearing strange sounds that no one else hears. Time is displaced and continually disputed for the protagonists, as they pass their days under the influence of a decades-old nuclear reactor, a relic of the Cold War holding nuclear waste with a millenary half-life, and the millions of years required for the formation of mountains, which are studied at the reactor, at the atomic level.

In livestock farming the blood of slaughtered cows becomes either a hidden component of products ranging from pharmaceuticals to soy substitutes, or it gets discarded, dried and burned for energy. Following this invisible trail of blood, the film investigates the architecture and tools that determine the value of a material once considered the substance of life.

Within a banana plantation and a botanic garden, a panel of botanic experts are challenged to discuss contemporary trends in gardening, scientific classification, and monocultural crops by an astute interviewer. The hidden politics of the experts’ positions are uncomfortably exposed and confronted with reality, as they render themselves suspicious of their own language.