Terrarium
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Annalisa Mair
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
The film shows the isolation and separation our species imposes on the planet, as natural habitats struggle to survive surrounded by controlled man-made environments, inviting reflection on our place within a shared home.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise is basically the environmental essay-film playbook everyone's been doing since the 2010s—nature trapped in glass, humans as gardeners of extinction—but Mair's actually doing something weirder here with form that I need to see twice to articulate it properly.
Mair situates herself in the lineage of essay cinema and structural environmentalism, and the three-minute constraint becomes a formal argument in itself—each frame weighted like a gallery installation, refusing the comfort of narrative momentum to force genuine duration and presence.
The singular move here is whatever Mair chose to do with negative space and sound design in a three-minute runtime—betting that emptiness and restraint will carry the weight that most filmmakers reach for with montage and swelling scores.