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For his short film The Five-Minute Museum (2015), the UK director Paul Bush was given access to objects in some of the premier historical museums of Europe, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bern Historical Museum in Switzerland. The resulting short video provides a whirlwind survey of human history, from arrowheads to plastic toys. Flipping through objects at a rate of 24 images per second, Bush builds a series of stop-motion animations spanning from the Bronze Age to the Information Age, and touching on such timeless and intertwined human endeavours as religion, recreation, food, currency and war. Meticulously crafted with impressive sound design to match, the resulting film forms an arc that perhaps mirrors the character of humanity itself – brimming with contradictions, and cascading ever forward.
Director: Paul Bush
Producers: Gerd Gockell, Ted Sieger, Jochen Ehmann
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Architecture
Tour the European architecture that dreamed of a wondrous, fictitious China
16 minutes
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Spirituality
Trek alongside spiritual pilgrims on a treacherous journey across Pakistan
6 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
Photographs offer a colonialist window to the past – one that must be challenged
14 minutes
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Animals and humans
An artist and ants collaborate on an exhibit of ‘tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings’
5 minutes
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Mathematics
How a curious question about colouring maps changed mathematics forever
9 minutes
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Cities
The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith
18 minutes
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Gender
When aggression is viewed as brilliance, it hurts women in science, and science itself
5 minutes
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Religion
From God’s shoes to satellites in heaven – children weigh in on religion
8 minutes
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Stories and literature
Myths from Earth’s edge – what the Icelandic sagas reveal about Norse morality
57 minutes