
2026
Humboldt USA
2026
Humboldt USA
German polymath Alexander von Humboldt was welcomed by President Thomas Jefferson and his name is lent to places across the United States. So why does nobody know Humboldt or his radical musings on our interconnected world? G. Anthony Svatek’s astonishingly beautiful essay film will get you up to speed.
“Everything is interconnectedness.” So said heroic German polymath Alexander von Humboldt, the subject of Brooklyn-based award-winning Austrian filmmaker G. Anthony Svatek’s haunting, form-expanding experimental documentary. Unlike Charles Darwin, the household name who supplanted him, Humboldt remains almost anonymous despite his name being lent to places across the United States. Humboldt believed that all of the natural world, including our place in it, existed in holistic harmony, rather than the battle of ‘natural’ selection. But is all interconnectedness good? Fast forward to now, and social media means we can witness bighorn sheep being helicoptered into a nature reserve in the Nevada desert that bears Humboldt’s name. We can scroll past the dance-forward TikToks of a devoted ranger advocating for California’s Humboldt Redwoods State Park, while a more pessimistic couple capture it in 3D just in case. And we can like and subscribe to the campaign to restore Buffalo’s dear green space lost to the pollution-spewing traffic jam of Humboldt Parkway. But does our digital remove render all these things irrelevant? That’s the searing premise of Svatek’s trippily chimerical essay film, contrasting Humboldt’s abundant hope for our presence in nature with the ravages of nature-destroying colonialism and the planet-draining threat of our AI data centres-driven destiny.
