TIAFF: Shifting Baselines

Boca Chica, Texas, also known as Starbase, is the launch site of Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX. While Musk dreams of travelling to Mars, the beach and nearby nature reserve are being ravaged by pollution.
In striking black-and-white cinematography, we see how gigantic phallic objects dominate the landscape. With Shifting Baselines, director Julien Élie tells a nuanced story without sensationalism, giving voice to both admirers and critics alike. This urgent and timely documentary is an intelligent plea against intergenerational amnesia, linking nostalgia for lost times to the exploitation inherent in colonialism.
The film will be introduced by a lecture by Marc Argeloo. Argeloo is a well-known figure in Dutch nature and bird conservation. He has worked for organisations including the World Wide Fund for Nature and Vogelbescherming Nederland. In ‘Natuuramnesie’ (Nature Amnesia), he writes about the phenomenon of the shifting baseline syndrome: each new generation no longer knows how different, and often richer, nature was in the youth of their parents or grandparents. Even conservationists rarely look back more than forty years, due to a lack of official data. Marc arrives at important and confronting insights into how we perceive nature today.