Dramatic close-ups capture something percolating and exploding – but what is it?

Winner of the Jury Prize in the 1981 Cannes Film Festival’s Short Films competition, Zea is an impressive and exhilarating piece of macro filmmaking. In a montage, close-ups capture a mysterious yellow subject as it heats and bubbles. But what is it? Canadian filmmakers André Leduc and Jean-Jacques Leduc keep viewers in suspense with a sequence that gradually builds in effervescence, ultimately erupting in a conclusion befitting its dramatic orchestral accompaniment, Tallis Fantasia (1910) by Ralph Vaughn Williams.