'Humboldt USA' Doc Film Interview on Nature: Visions du Réel 2026
'Humboldt USA'
Courtesy of Space Time Films
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Countless places across the U.S. bear the name of Alexander von Humboldt. In fact, the German naturalist and polymath has been described as the person with more species – from penguins and monkeys to an orchid – and places named after him than any other human. And at the beginning of the 19th century, he proposed a radical idea that has also been popular in the context of climate change: to consider nature as a “network of interconnected lives.”
Humboldt USA, the feature film debut from G. Anthony Svatek, follows in his footsteps, traveling across the U.S., from ancient redwood forests to a parkway in New York state and the bright lights of Nevada, to explore our evolving relationship with nature. Weaving together the stories of people in those locations, Humboldt’s own words and thoughts from the filmmaker, the kaleidoscopic result is a playful, but also fraught, love letter to the naturalist.
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Humboldt USA world premieres in the international feature film competition of the 57th edition of the Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel in Nyon, near Geneva, on Wednesday, April 22. After that, the film will get its U.S. and North American premiere on May 2 at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look, its festival focused on “adventurous new cinema.”
“Countless places across the United States still bear the name of Alexander von Humboldt — queer naturalist, visionary ecologist, now largely forgotten,” highlight the press notes for the movie. “The longing filmmaker uses three of them as unlikely common ground, weaving through present-day lives: urban activists greening neglected neighborhoods, scientists scanning redwood forests, hunters returning bighorn sheep to protected land. Across generations and landscapes, Humboldt USA asks what remains of a vision of ‘interconnectedness’.”
Humboldt USA was produced by Svatek and Elijah Stevens of Space Time Films, which is also handling sales. Svatek wrote and directed the doc, with Sean Hanley and the filmmaker handling the film’s cinematography. The editing was done by Kaija Siirala and Svatek.
Brooklyn-based Svatek, whose shorts have included the 2023 Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, a “cine-collage manifesto in defense of beauty amidst political cynicism and environmental alienation” based on an essay by George Orwell and narrated by Tilda Swinton, was raised in the Austrian Alps. And as you can probably already tell, his work has probed humans’ fractured relationship with the natural world.
‘Humboldt USA’
Courtesy of Space Time Films
Ahead of the film’s world premiere, Svatek talked to THR about Humboldt USA, humans’ relationship with nature and what elements of his personal experience mirror Humboldt’s life.
Why did you decide to make a film about Humboldt? What spoke to you about his life? I was aware of some of his work, but didn’t realize how big a mark he left in the U.S.
I also knew him as a name and as a figure, but not much more than that. In 2015, a best-selling book came out, The Invention of Nature [by Andrea Wulf], which was a very gripping biography that I read. It made him out to be this gay proto-environmentalist who predicted man-made climate change 200 years ago, which was a very appealing story.
I identified with him in some way, because there were these biographical parallels between him and me. He called himself half-American, half-German, and I am half-Austrian, half-American. We have the same birthday. We’re both queer. These biographical parallels got me hooked on this personal level, but the pervasiveness and fame that he had at the time, and how it showed itself in the landscape all across the United States, were also really interesting to me.
He became the anchor, an interesting figure, to think about how environmentalism and our relationship to the natural world have changed over the past 200 years. His approach to the natural world was either this romanticized approach or a very scientific one. And he encapsulates both of those.
Can you tell me a bit more about those two approaches?
I feel that within the Western paradigm, we’re still struggling with these two opposites. Nature’s either fenced in at a national park or it is the domain of science. Both of them