The Alluvials (Chapter 1: California Pilled)
2023 · 11m · United States
Directed by Alice Bucknell
Genres: essay film, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
In a near-future Los Angeles gripped by drought, nonhuman protagonists navigate the city's water systems in a game-engine speculative fiction on ecology, technology, and capital.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's doing climate allegory right now, but Bucknell's moving nonhuman agents through a game engine instead of wringing tears from us — that's genuinely perverse in the best way, and most scouts will miss why it works.
Bucknell positions this squarely in the lineage of speculative essay films (Harun Farocki, Forensic Architecture) while the game-engine form insists on its own contemporary rigor — a formal conversation between documentary impulse and digital abstraction that demands serious attention.
The decision to render LA's water systems through game logic rather than naturalism is the hinge: it transforms ecological despair into something playable and therefore thinkable, and that single formal choice elevates what could've been another climate screed into something genuinely exploratory on a modest footprint.