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Baraf: ice men of Mumbai

5 minutes

Dani

8 minutes

The physarum experiments

5 minutes

Kierkegaard’s horror of doubt

7 minutes

Is our attention for sale?

4 minutes

Mumbai’s fishing industry is hungry for ice. Plunge into the fray with those who feed it

Sassoon Docks is one of Mumbai’s largest and oldest fishing ports. A cacophonous and bustling centre of commerce, some 20 tons of fish are unloaded there daily. When heading out to sea and upon arrival, fish traders rely on the teams of ice makers and transporters at the docks to keep the hauls fresh. Working in teams, these ‘ice men’ – often natives of far-off Uttar Pradesh in northern India – store, shovel, crush and cart vast quantities of ice that fishermen use to preserve their catches during weeks away at sea, and on which merchants keep their goods fresh when displaying them for sale or readying them for transport. In Baraf (Hindi for ‘ice’), bursts of hot and cold seemingly emanate from the screen as the filmmakers Niyantha Shekar and Anirudh Ganapathy catalogue the skills, sweat, aches and breaks of the ice men’s work. With a kinetic editing style, the duo achieve a musical rhythm from the details of craft and community that comprise a microcosm of the larger economic structure of the Mumbai port.

Director and editor: Niyantha Shekar

Director of photography: Anirudh Ganapathy

Producers: Niyantha Shekar, Anirudh Ganapathy

‘I hate giving you bad news’: when a daughter with breast cancer calls her mother

Danielle Hernandez is 30 and has Stage 4 breast cancer. As she calls her mother Violeta in Florida to deliver an update on her treatment from her home in Los Angeles, she oscillates between medical jargon and silver livings, with the more difficult pieces of information hidden in the subtext, only occasionally bubbling to the surface. This intimate conversation is captured by her roommate, the US filmmaker Lizzy Hogenson, in the short film Dani. Using a stop-motion technique that combines felt figures and claymation, Hogenson places her own veneer on the discussion, which is pierced by intermittent cracks of raw emotion, hard truths and silence. The result is at once affecting and distressing, as small moments of love, courage and pain spark and fade into uncertainty.

Director: Lizzy Hogenson

Producer: Kyle McClary

Creeping through mazes, repelling adversaries – the slow-motion smarts of slime moulds

To the naked eye, the organism Physarum polycephalum – commonly referred to as ‘slime mould’ – might seem an unexceptional creature, despite its bright-yellow glow, as its acellular existence is dedicated to tracking nutrients at a speed of 1mm per hour. But this protist’s surprising computational cunning becomes apparent when viewed in time-lapse, revealing a life form that seems to possess intelligence despite lacking a nervous system. Between 2009 and 2018, the UK artist and researcher Heather Barnett conducted a series of clever experiments in which she probed slime moulds’ capacities for forming complex tube networks and adjusting to obstacles. For this short film, Aeon Video compiled Barnett’s ‘creative collaborations’ with P polycephalum into a montage that builds in complexity, emphasising the slime moulds’ surprisingly sophisticated capacities for problem-solving.

Director: Heather Barnett

Sound designer: Graham Barton

Editor: Tamur Qutab

Want to think for yourself? Start with an agonising state of doubt, says Kierkegaard

Influenced by Socrates’ sense of irony, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) came to believe that a state of doubt – disorienting and horrifying as it could sometimes be – was the cornerstone of a sound philosophical practice. This scepticism of objective truth and ardent belief in thinking for oneself is omnipresent in his pseudonymous works, in which his assumed names sometimes even spar with one another. While amusing, the peculiar literary device also undercuts any sense that the works were written by a voice of authority. In this video from the London Review of Books, the British philosopher and historian Jonathan Rée traces the theme of doubt in Kierkegaard’s life and work using his unfinished, posthumously published novel Johannes Climacus: Or a Life of Doubt as a starting point.

Video by the London Review of Books

Producer: Anthony Wilks

A handful of executives control the ‘attention economy’. Time for attentive resistance

From fitness tracking devices to search engines, it’s easy to think of personalised technologies as convenient shortcuts and useful tools for working towards goals. But, argues James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a former Google employee, the primary aim of personalised tech is to keep users coming back by any means necessary – and often in a way that encourages empty distraction. In this brief animation featuring audio from a 2017 lecture at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) in London, Williams makes the case that the consolidation of the ‘attention economy’ to just a handful of companies is an unprecedented and deeply fraught human experiment – and one that demands active, attentive resistance.

Video by the RSA

Director: Olga Makarchuk

Mumbai’s fishing industry is hungry for ice. Plunge into the fray with those who feed it

Sassoon Docks is one of Mumbai’s largest and oldest fishing ports. A cacophonous and bustling centre of commerce, some 20 tons of fish are unloaded there daily. When heading out to sea and upon arrival, fish traders rely on the teams of ice makers and transporters at the docks to keep the hauls fresh. Working in teams, these ‘ice men’ – often natives of far-off Uttar Pradesh in northern India – store, shovel, crush and cart vast quantities of ice that fishermen use to preserve their catches during weeks away at sea, and on which merchants keep their goods fresh when displaying them for sale or readying them for transport. In Baraf (Hindi for ‘ice’), bursts of hot and cold seemingly emanate from the screen as the filmmakers Niyantha Shekar and Anirudh Ganapathy catalogue the skills, sweat, aches and breaks of the ice men’s work. With a kinetic editing style, the duo achieve a musical rhythm from the details of craft and community that comprise a microcosm of the larger economic structure of the Mumbai port.

Director and editor: Niyantha Shekar

Director of photography: Anirudh Ganapathy

Producers: Niyantha Shekar, Anirudh Ganapathy

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Detail of ‘Siege of the City’ by Jean Charlot, watercolour of a fresco at Chichén Itzá. The Maya mural from the Las Monjas building clearly shows a ship with the distinct wooden planks of a Viking boat © Jean Charlot/Artists Rights Society [ARS]; Copyright Agency, 2020

Essay/
Global history
Vikings in America

Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel?

Valerie Hansen

An American advertisement for Royal Crown Cola from 1955. Photo by Alamy

Essay/
Gender
Angels in the market

The heart-tug tactics of 1950s ads steered white American women away from activism into domesticity. They’re still there

Ellen Wayland-Smith