Motherlode

Richly detailed amateur ethnographic film on the agrarian economy and society in rural Punjab.

In search of the lucrative matsutake mushroom, two former soldiers discover the means to gradually heal their wounds of war. Roger, a self-described 'fall-down drunk' and sniper in Vietnam, and Kouy, a Cambodian refugee who fought the Khmer Rouge, bonded in the bustling tent-city known as Mushroom Camp, which pops up each autumn in the Oregon woods. Their friendship became an adoptive family; according to a Cambodian custom, if you lose your family like Kouy, you must rebuilt it anew. Now, however, this new family could be lost. Roger's health is declining and trauma flashbacks rack his mind; Kouy gently aids his family before the snow falls and the hunting season ends, signaling his time to leave.

The film takes on a walk alongside parasites, symbionts and decomposers offering ideas of both interconnectedness and collaboration. Driven by a vision of resistance, the encounters seek possibilities of renewal and question what connects us when the world seems to be falling apart. With mushrooms and their allies the film invites to imagine a myco-cultural (r)evolution. What if the fungus could help us address and radically change our relationship to this world?

You find fungi in Antarctica and in nuclear reactors. They live inside your lungs and your skin is covered with them. Fungi are the most under appreciated and unexplained organisms, yet they could cure you from smallpox and turn cardboard boxes into forests. They could even transform Mars into Eden. There are vastly more fungi species than plants and each and every one of them play a crucial role in life’s support systems. Join us on a journey into the mysterious world of Fungi to witness their beauty, unravel their mysteries and discover how this secret kingdom is essential to life on Earth, and may in fact hold the key to our future.

Žampiony

Le monde extraordinaire des champignons

The Pharmacratic Inquisition is a provocative film from Gnostic Media that makes the argument that virtually all of the mythology, symbolism, and story of Jesus and related Christian traditions relate to two basic subjects: astrology and shamanism. For those unfamiliar with the evidence in support of this claim, this film can be truly eye opening and revolutionary. This is a DVD companion for the book, Astrotheology & Shamanism. This DVD companion contains about 25% of the information presented in book, though it contains about double the images. The DVD is not meant to have detailed sources. If you are interested in the sources used for this video, please see the book Astrotheology & Shamanism.

A secret culture of foragers hunt the Matsutake, a coveted Japanese mushroom worth up to $1,000 a pound—although its true value lies underground as a brilliant networker and healer of ruined landscapes. The Matsutake might just be our last, best hope for an American forest system run amok.

This film essay about mushrooms and their connections to other living things tries to use the structure of mushrooms to explain nature, science, and civilization, all the while searching for various analogies, such as the similarities between mycorrhiza and other structures.

Osiris' Gift is a short stop motion animated film that follows an explorer in a desert searching for mythical 'immortality mushrooms'.

As he falls down the spiral of personal obsession; a delusional mycologist finds himself in the midst of seeking the unattainable. Morals won't play a role in his relentless pursuit of transforming his being into fungus.

A group of American teens comes to Ireland to visit a friend who takes them on a camping trip in search of the local, fabled magic mushrooms. When the psychedelics start taking hold, the panicked friends are attacked by ghostly creatures; but how can they determine whether what they are experiencing is reality or hallucination?

Five vacationers and two crewmen become stranded on a tropical island near the equator. The island has little edible food for them to use as they try to live in a fungus covered hulk while repairing Kessei's yacht. Eventually they struggle over the food rations which were left behind by the former crew. Soon they discover something unfriendly there...

Pressured into giving away his clothes, an emasculated young man obsessively attempts to reclaim his cherished sweater before it vanishes into the donation abyss.

A party of archaeologists discovers the remnants of a mutant five millennia-old Sumerian civilization living beneath a glacier atop a mountain in Mesopatamia.

Harpy and her pet goblin cat Pumpkin are enjoying a peaceful day in the forest, until a couple of baby monsters have a spat!

Housemaid Georgette loves to gossip and this causes major trouble to people around her.

A man searches hopelessly for his friend in the woods.

In the 15th century, a young goatherd living alone in a mountain hut feels a dark presence in the woods.

Lily and Richard move to a luxurious and cult-like community, where Lily becomes unsettled by the transformation she observes in her older husband and in her own physiology, leading her to wonder if there's something more sinister at play.