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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.
Director: Tijana Petrović
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Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Villagers struggle to keep their beloved, endangered ape population afloat
19 minutes
video
Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
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Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
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Biology
Starlings swoosh like brushstrokes across the sky in this dazzling short
3 minutes
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Information and communication
‘Astonished and somewhat terrified’ – Victorians’ reactions to the phonograph
36 minutes
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Engineering
From simple motors to levitating trains – how design shapes innovation
23 minutes
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Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes