FILM SCREENING

Lichens Are The Way by Critical Media Lab
Lichens Are The Way by Critical Media Lab
Lichens Are The Way by Critical Media Lab
Lichens Are The Way by Critical Media Lab

Peterson Hall 108

Sep 25, 2025

2 hours

Leadership for the Ecozoic's Dandelions Screening Series Presents:

Lichens Are The Way (2024)
A film by Ondrej Vavrecka
Post-Screening Q+A with the director via Zoom

Synopsis:
Deep in the woods near Wells Gray Provincial Park, British Columbia, two biologists are inspired to organize their lives by the same principles that guide the spectacular universe of lichens that grow near their remote cabin. In this lush and hypnotic journey through the forest understory, enfant terrible of science Trevor Goward and his partner Curtis Randal Björk explore the symbiotic relationship between the two entities that make up lichens—fungus and alga—and how their co-existence can provide a metaphor for how humans should survive into the future. Richly shot on 16mm film and accompanied by a spacious soundscape, Lichens Are the Way is a cinematic ode to what Goward calls “the most abstract art among living beings.” Opening up a new way of seeing, this film is a striking meditation on what we can learn from nature


Bio:
Ondřej Vavrečka is a flmmaker, artist, and scholar. He studied economics, languages, philosophy, and flm. His works are both playful and intellectually rigorous. His major questions touch the abstract, psychical, religious, and metaphysical frameworks of our shared existence. He has created four feature-length documentaries and many shorts, performed in several musical groups, curated exhibitions, shown his own images, photographs, and objects, acted in the theatre, sewed his own costumes, and generally made his own way through this world, holes, hills, mountains, seas and all.