New York Times excellent review: http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/movies/what-on-earth-probes-mysteries-of-crop-circles-review.html?
WHAT ON EARTH?
Inside the Crop Circle Mystery
Opens on Earth Day, April 22, at New York’s QUAD Cinema
Look What’s Cropping Up: Charting a Territory of Awe and Wonder
With Special Events Panels
Still to come:
• THURSDAY, APRIL 28 @ 6:45 and 9:05
Q&A with filmmaker Suzanne Taylor, Jodi Serota http://jodiserota.com and Laird Scranton http://store.innertraditions.com/Contributor.jmdx?action=displayDetail&id=1542
New York, NY – March 8, 2011 – The QUAD Cinema presents the New York premiere of the indie documentary, WHAT ON EARTH? (81 min.) produced and directed by Suzanne Taylor and winner of the Best Feature Documentary at the UFO Congress Film Festival.
Take a ride with filmmaker Suzanne Taylor as she engages a fascinating subculture of artists, educators, geometers, philosophers, and farmers, enthralled by the mystery of crop circles. For twenty years, Taylor has been part of a lively international community that gathers in England every summer to study and document circle developments. WHAT ON EARTH? tracks her interactions with these “croppies,” as they go circle chasing, pore over circle analysis, and share why they keep coming back for more.
Dubbed “crop circles” when the earliest shapes were in circular form, these mostly geometric patterns—some as big as two football fields—are flattened into crop fields, usually during the night. Plants being bent and not broken, biological changes to plants and chemical changes to soil, failure of electromagnetic equipment, and even physical healings inside the circles are presented as defying explanation.
Captivating for its gorgeous photography of the glyphs, WHAT ON EARTH? was shot in Southern England, a landscape dotted with ruins like Stonehenge and Avebury, where the ancients performed sacred rituals. This is the hotbed of circle activity: thousands have appeared during the last thirty years, with evidence of the first occurrence dating from the 17th century. Lest we tie this phenomenon solely to England, which has the highest concentration of circles, the film shows they have cropped up in some forty other countries, including the United States.
In her breezy, inviting style, Taylor draws out croppies who have the best stories to tell. Their conversations take place in picturesque settings: charming farmhouses, ancient stone circles, medieval churches and graveyards, and, of course, inside the awesome crop circles themselves.
In 1991, in a press release that was picked up around the world, two farmers, still remembered simply as Doug and Dave, claimed to be the lone creators of the English crop formations. The film exposes their subterfuge and calls into question the veracity of copy-cat hoaxers who followed in their footsteps. Taylor’s approach, however, is not to look for the source of the circles, but to engage and document a culture that is riveted by a conviction that this land art is coming from non-human intelligent life.
In her film, the crop circle community contends that the acknowledgment of visitation from elsewhere could give rise to a new era when our penchant for war and our insatiable materialism will be replaced by compassionate concern for one another. “Perhaps if we knew we weren’t the only intelligent beings in the universe,” says Taylor, “it would humble us and unite us.” As one of the subjects in her film says, “That could be what saves this civilization.”
About Suzanne Taylor:
Taylor was the Executive Producer of the feature documentary, CROP CIRCLES: Quest for Truth, which received the Audience Award in 2003 from the UFO Congress Film Festival, and is a crop circle authority for the History Channel series, Ancient Aliens. Founder of Mighty Companions, a non-profit dedicated to consciousness expansion, her Los Angeles home is a gathering place for forward-thinking activists. A former actress, a fine arts painter, and an accomplished chef, Taylor is the author of The Anybody Can Make It, Everybody Will Love It Cookbook. She writes a blog, Making Sense of These Times, about progressive ideas including considerations of how consciousness might evolve: http://TheConversation.org
Suzanne Taylor available in New York City 4/15-28 for appearances and interviews
Website: http://Facebook.com/WhatOnEarth Hi res photolink: http://TheConversation.org/movie-images
WHAT ON EARTH?(81 min.) Opens April 22, 2011, at the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street,
New York, NY 10011 p: 212-255-2243 f: 212-255-2247 http://quadcinema.com
ADVANCE TICKET SALES CALL 777FILM #636 OR PURCHASE FROM http://movietickets.com
Contact: Anne Borin
annefilm@aol.com
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