When a giant blue whale washes up on a beach in California, people begin to flock from all over to take in the sight. As they pose for photos beside the enormous carcass, and question the creature’s origins, the filmmaker Tijana Petrović watches them watching. Her short documentary Back to Land meditates on our fascination with the spectacle of nature, and observes the limitations of human knowledge against the breadth of our curiosity.
The beached carcass of a blue whale is a terrible, wondrous sight
Director: Tijana Petrović

videoEcology and environmental sciences
Close-ups reveal how caterpillars live long enough to cocoon
9 minutes

videoBiology
What would it mean if we were able to ‘speak’ with whales?
65 minutes

videoBiology
For 3 billion years, life was unicellular. Why did it start to collaborate?
4 minutes

videoEthics
A deathbed scenario raises the question: how much power should a promise hold?
5 minutes

videoBiology
Dive deep into an egg cell to see how ageing reboots when a new life begins
2 minutes

videoMathematics
After centuries of trying, we’ve yet to arrive at a perfect way to map colour
20 minutes

videoNature and landscape
‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden
5 minutes

videoAnimals and humans
One man’s quest to save an orphaned squirrel, as narrated by David Attenborough
14 minutes

videoBiology
Butterflies become unrecognisable landscapes when viewed under electron microscopes
4 minutes