18/03/2024 - Max Kestner’s film asks just one good question: what would it be like to be a spruce? Everything else poses as cerebral, while in fact it’s simply exhausting

If you are curious to learn more about the meaning and the purpose of life – and these are two very, very different questions – you won’t find what you’re looking for in Life and Other Problems by Max Kestner, which is partaking in the DOX:AWARD Competition at CPH:DOX. In this intellectually undisciplined film essay, the director, who is also the narrator and just another curious human being, talks to scientists from different fields, shares his reflections on fatherhood and sprinkles it all with his musings on the nature of things.

The biggest and most unwitting discovery of Life and Other Problems is that not everything that sounds logical must be logical or have a cause-and-effect relationship. Here, science is confused with philosophy, thinking with reasoning, and thoughts with facts. Kestner admits in one of the letters he writes to a scientist that he “is standing on one leg in Google Translate”, which could be a clue as to how confusion and mental exhaustion could easily set in amidst the primordial soup of this film.

If this movie is a satire on gonzo-meets-science docs, it’s not particularly funny either, and it capitalises on the death of Marius the giraffe, euthanised in Copenhagen Zoo in 2014. The institution’s director, when interviewed by Kestner, gives an explanation of the act, which was based on the laws of nature: Marius was genetically redundant and rejected by his herd. The media and people protesting against the shooting of the animal used emotional arguments, as if it were one of their own tribe. And genetically, it kind of is. There were many pleas and offers to save Marius – one even came from Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the Chechen Republic, but the zoo director stuck to his guns and declined all of them.

This element of the film – the clash between two ways of reasoning and understanding the world – is by far the most interesting one. The Marius story is intertwined with conversations with researchers and scholars, who are, for example, asked if plants in a greenhouse know that a human has entered the room. There is also a monologue by the director, who asks himself questions such as, “What would it be like to be a spruce?”, which is probably the only truly original one in his film.

And of course, there is a lot of archive footage of cells, protozoa and other forms of life, which are supposed to add style, like a Hermes scarf embellishing a polyester jacket. Watching Life and Other Problems is like wading through a lake in the mist – it’s difficult to see the destination, and after all of the pain and the intellectual effort, it’s easy to simply end up back at the starting point.

Life and Other Problems is a joint effort involving Denmark, Sweden and the UK. It was produced by Bullitt Film, in co-production with Hopscotch Films and Plattform Produktion. Its international sales are handled by DR Sales.