ATMOSPHERE

The atmosphere that protectively envelops our planet is the indispensable basis of our lives. It not only provides us with air, water and nourishment but, in accord with the double meaning of the word, it defines us as social beings: just as we need air to breathe, we need a protective atmosphere of cooperative togetherness to survive.

Erwin Wagenhofer is intimately familiar with the problems of our crisis-ridden times. In his new film ATMOSPHERE, he again does not gloss over their root causes, but is far more interested in how we can solve them. This is why he introduces us to people who have left the old behind and ventured into the new. They include an artist in Berlin-Brandenburg who became a farmer and transformed exhausted fields into a flourishing landscape, a team of leading experts in earthen construction who are turning the traditional material of clay into a building material for the future, and a visionary Swiss researcher and agronomist whose reforestation of a rainforest has breathed new life not just into a patch of dead land, but into an entire region.

ATMOSPHERE shows us people who have stepped out of the logic of profit and, by transforming their environment, also transformed themselves. Each of them has restored damaged nature to new vitality and replaced competition with cooperation.

ATMOSPHERE is a film that inspires hope and nurtures the confidence that we can turn our lives around for the better. We simply have to stop heading in the wrong direction.