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In the animated documentary The Waiting, Karen Lips, professor of biology at University of Maryland, College Park, chronicles a mysterious mass disappearance she encountered across two field studies in Costa Rica and Panama in the early 1990s. Framing the incident as a ‘cold case’, Lips recalls how, upon returning to a once-thriving ecosystem where she had researched the metamorphoses of Isthmohyla calypsa, a small tree frog, she was shocked to find that the creatures she’d been studying had disappeared. To tell the story, the German director Volker Schlecht pairs Lips’s words with meticulous sound design and flowing hand-drawn sketches that adorn biologically accurate images with impressionistic touches. Ultimately, the immersive work reveals a troubling global problem, against the background of humanity’s far-reaching, yet often unseen, impacts on nonhuman animal populations across the globe.
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Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes
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Archaeology
What’s an ancient Greek brick doing in a Sumerian city? An archeological investigation
16 minutes
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Family life
The migrants missing in Mexico, and the mothers who won’t stop searching for them
21 minutes
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History
From Afghanistan to Virginia – the Muslims who fought in the American Civil War
22 minutes
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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Fairness and equality
Visit the small Texas community that lives in the shadow of SpaceX launches
14 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
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History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes