BISFF2025｜Future Ethics 未来伦理学

Future Ethics

Future Ethics is not merely a speculation about the future, but an exercise in re-learning how to coexist. It refuses to place humanity at the center of the world, instead turning to the long-ignored voices of the earth—soil, plants, animals, minerals, wind, and water—and to the knowledge and memory that circulate among them. In the face of accelerated urbanization, capitalist expansion, and ecological collapse, we must rethink the temporal scale of ethics: not as a linear movement from the present toward the future, but as a continuum of reverberations across past, present, and what is yet to come.

BISFF 2025, in collaboration with Greenpeace, presents Future Ethics, a special environmental film program composed of four chapters. “A Language Older Than Words”, drawing on Derrick Jensen’s ideas, returns to the language of nature itself—forms of communication older than human speech—where trees, oil, forests, and lichens become living beings that can speak. “Ruins of Progress” turns its gaze toward the industrial relics and urban debris of modernization, tracing new ecological possibilities amid decay and regeneration; those once-symbolic sites of progress—factories, infrastructures, cities—now stand as texts inscribed by time and climate. “We Have Never Been Modern” reveals how Indigenous and local ecological knowledge continues to speak within the overwhelming current of globalization and modernization, echoing Bruno Latour’s proposition that nature and society were never truly separate, and that human civilization has always been co-composed by human and nonhuman actors. Finally, “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, borrowing Derrida’s title, rethinks the relationship between human and animal. When humanity finds itself under the animal’s gaze, we are compelled to ask again: Who am I? In this inter-species encounter, ethics sheds its anthropocentric shell and becomes a more open, vulnerable form of coexistence.

From the inheritance between humans and the land to the ruins of modernity; from the listening of natural language to the mutual gaze across species—these works share a central question: as the finitude of the Earth becomes undeniable, how might humanity redefine the meaning of “good”? Perhaps the ethics of the future is not about control or salvation, but about listening, cohabitation, and mutual transformation. What we call “the future” has already been quietly unfolding among all living things.

未来伦理学

“未来伦理学”并不只是对未来的想象，而是一种重新学习“如何共存”的练习。它拒绝把人类放在世界的中心，转而倾听那些被忽视的声音——土地、植物、动物、矿物、风与水——以及在它们之间延续的知识与记忆。面对加速的城市化、资本扩张与生态崩塌，我们需要重新思考伦理的时间尺度：它并非此刻面向未来的单向线，而是贯穿过去、当下与尚未到来的多重回响。

BISFF2025邀请绿色和平Greenpeace联合推出“Future Ethics 未来伦理学”环境影像特别策划，该单元由四个部分构成。“古老于言语的语言” 借德里克·詹森（Derrick Jensen）的思想，回到自然本身的语言：一种不依赖言语、却比语言更古老的交流，让树木、石油、森林与地衣成为能诉说的生命体。“我们从未现代过” 揭示原住民与地方社群的生态智慧如何在全球化的洪流中持续发声。“进步的废墟” 将目光投向工业化的遗产与城市的残骸，在衰败与复生之间辨认新的生态可能。那些曾象征进步的建筑、工厂与基础设施，如今成为了时间与气候书写的文本。“动物故我在” 引用德里达的讲座标题，从动物的凝视出发，重构人类与他者的关系，在跨物种的互视中，伦理获得新的形态——更开放，也更脆弱。

从人与土地的传承，到现代性废墟的反思；从自然语言的倾听，到跨物种的凝视。它们共同追问一个核心问题——在地球的有限性被彻底揭示的当下，人类如何重新定义“善”的含义？或许，未来的伦理并非关于控制与拯救，而是关于聆听、共居与相互变形。我们所称之为“未来”的，早已在万物之间静默地展开。

check here to see full Iist for Future Ethics

 Lichens Are the Way, Ondrej Vavrecka 2024

Future Ethics · Part I 未来伦理学 第一部分

A Language Older Than Words 古老于言语的语言

In his book of the same title, American writer Derrick Jensen suggests that nature itself speaks in ways that precede and transcend language. The power of environmental cinema lies not merely in representation but in inviting us to listen—to how nature speaks. Journal of a Tree connects a mourner’s solitude to the whisper of the forest, letting trees guide healing and coexistence; My Name Is Oil personifies petroleum as a being with its own heartbeat and veins, exposing the catastrophe born of human desire; the symbolic JIRAPO weaves together bees, ancestors, and dreams into a sensory eye of the Amazon forest, as if nature had always known us before we knew it. Lichens Are the Way centers on the lichen to explore the idea of eco-sufficiency—a mode of coexistence among species that gestures toward humanity’s future survival. True ecological ethics lies not only in human discourse, but in whether we can recognize and learn the language of nature itself. In this dialogue older than words, we rediscover our place within the living community of the Earth.

美国作家德里克·詹森（Derrick Jensen）曾在同名著作中提出，自然本身就是一种在语言之前、超越语言的交流方式。环境影像的所能并非仅仅再现环境，而是邀请观众去倾听自然如何说话。《树木日记》（Journal of a Tree）将丧亲者的孤独与森林的低语相连，让树木成为疗愈与共生的引导；《我的名字是石油》（My Name Is Oil）把石油塑造为有心脏与血脉的生命体，揭示人类贪欲所孕育的灾变；更具象征意味的《吉拉波》（JIRAPO），将蜂巢、祖辈与梦境编织为一幅亚马逊森林的感知之眼，仿佛自然先于我们知晓一切。而《地衣之道》（Lichens Are the Way）则以地衣为中心，讲述一种“生态充足（Eco-sufficiency）”——生物间选择共同存在，隐喻着人类未来的生存可能。真正的生态伦理并非只存在于人类话语之内，而在于我们是否愿意承认并学习自然的语言。在古老于言语的交流中，人类得以重新发现自身在生命共同体中的位置。

Future Ethics-1

Journal of a Tree | 树木日记

Lapo Mamoli Aprile, Edoardo Gabbai 拉波·马莫利·阿普里莱，爱德华多·加巴伊

2025 | 00:10:30 | UK, Italy | English | World Premiere

My Name Is Oil | 我的名字是石油

Igor Smola 伊戈尔·斯莫拉

2025 | 00:14:40 | Azerbaijan | Azerbaijani | Asian Premiere

Lichens Are the Way | 地衣之道

Ondrej Vavrecka 翁德雷·瓦夫列奇卡

2024 | 00:43:00 | Czech Republic, Slovakia | English | Asian Premiere

JIRAPO | 吉拉波

María Rojas Arias 玛丽亚·罗哈斯·阿里亚斯

2025 | 00:19:46 | Colombia, Portugal | Spanish | International Premiere

Journal of a Tree, Lapo Mamoli Aprile, Edoardo Gabbai, 2025

Future Ethics · Part II 未来伦理学 第二部分

We Have Never Been Modern 我们从未现代过

From the red cloth draped by a shepherd over a stone, to the voices of Nalu elders in Guinea intertwined with nostalgia and unease, to the vanishing boat myths of India’s Koli people amid urban expansion—we witness how ecological knowledge is transmitted through generations and faces rupture today. In Europe, traditional willow-weaving and the “Moss-Men” festival struggle to survive industrial and capitalist contexts, yet find renewal in new cultural landscapes.

Philosopher Bruno Latour reminds us that what we call “modernity” never truly separated nature from society; we have always lived within intricate hybrids of the human and nonhuman, the natural and the cultural. This chapter adopts his lens to revisit Indigenous and local ecological practices, presenting forms of knowledge, craft, and narrative that have resisted absorption by modern logic. Nature here is not background but the core of cultural memory and identity. These community experiences also respond to key questions in environmental anthropology: how traditional knowledge, reactivated under globalization and climate crisis, can inform a future ecological ethics. Collective rituals, oral histories, and embodied practices are not only witnesses of history but means of forging ethical relations between community and land. In the destructive processes of modernity, how do we protect, recover, or reinvent ways of living with nature? Ecological ethics may not reside solely in technological solutions to come—it also breathes within ancient myths, bodily labor, inherited practices, and the respiration of the earth itself.

从牧羊人为石头披上的红色布幔，到几内亚纳卢族长者们交织着怀旧与忧虑的口述，再到印度科利族在城市扩张中消逝的古老神话，我们看到生态知识如何代代传递，并在当下面临断裂的风险。欧洲的柳编传统与“苔藓人”节庆如何在工业化、资本化的语境中挣扎求存，并在新的文化语境中获得复兴。

布鲁诺·拉图尔提出，人类所谓的“现代性”并非真正割裂了自然与社会，相反，我们始终生活在错综复杂的人与物、自然与文化的混合体之中。本章节以此为题，借用这一视角回望原住民与在地社群的生态实践，呈现那些未被现代逻辑完全吸纳的知识、技艺与叙事。自然不只是背景，而是文化记忆和身份建构的核心部分。影片中的社区经验也回应了环境人类学（environmental anthropology）的基本命题：传统知识如何在全球化与气候危机中被重新激活，成为理解未来生态伦理的重要参照——而集体仪式、民间技艺、口述故事不仅是历史的见证，更是社群与土地之间建立伦理关系的方式。在现代性的破坏性进程中，我们如何保护、重拾甚至重新发明那些与自然共存的方式？也许生态伦理并非只存在于未来的科技方案里，它也潜藏在古老的神话、身体的劳动、代代相传的实践与土地的呼吸之中。

Future Ethics-2

Seen From Here, I Feel Like Belonging | 由此望之，我心如归

Leon Emonds-Pool, Emilia Auhagen-Kuoppamäki 莱昂·埃蒙茨－波尔，埃米莉亚·奥哈根－库奥帕迈基

2025 | 00:30:00 | Germany, Netherlands | English, German | World Premiere

Yontan | 永坦

Véronique Laveau 韦罗妮克·拉沃

2025 | 00:09:00 | Canada, Guinea | No Dialogue | World Premiere

Moss-Men | 苔藓人

Juan Carlos Verona 胡安·卡洛斯·韦罗纳

2025 | 00:14:00 | Spain | Spanish | Asian Premiere

Lumber | 伐木

Einar Henriksen 埃纳尔·亨里克森

2025 | 00:08:58 | Norway | Norwegian | International Premiere

The Good Omen | 吉兆

Alba Bresoli 阿尔芭·布雷索利

2024 | 00:13:43 | Spain | Catalan | Asian Premiere

Lost Songs of Sundari | 桑达丽的逝歌

Sudarshan Sarjerao Sawant 苏达尔尚·萨尔杰拉奥·萨万特

2025 | 00:08:43 | India | Marathi, Hindi | Chinese Mainland Premiere

Willow | 柳

Lindi Dedek 林迪·德代克

2025 | 00:11:42 | Germany, Poland, Czech Republic | English, Polish, Czech | World Premiere

 Seen From Here, I Feel Like Belonging, Leon Emonds-Pool, Emilia Auhagen-Kuoppamäki, 2025

Future Ethics · Part III 未来伦理学 第三部分

Ruins of Progress 进步的废墟

“The possibility of life in capitalist ruins”—the subtitle of Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015)—frames this chapter. Industrialization and urbanization once promised prosperity but have left behind the heavy cost of their own decay. Ruins of Progress reveals both the wounds of modernity and the potential for regeneration. The spaces in these films—factories, cities, wastelands—are simultaneously sites of memory and politics. In Anhovo, Slovenia, a century-old asbestos factory spans regimes and systems, its smoke obscuring the boundary between life and death; in Milan, trees serve as silent witnesses to urban renewal and climate change; in the financial ruins of Brussels, a swamp emerges, nurturing new forms of life and magic. The Perpetual Tapestry threads public health, climate, and finance into one woven rhythm of crisis and daily life. In Sinkholes, our gaze turns toward the ruins of the future—a water-deprived world frozen in entropy, confronting posthuman extinction. Modernization, it seems, was never a single path toward progress, but a cyclical, fractured history. Cities and industries are both the origins of destruction and the seedbeds of new ecologies. Amid the ruins, we learn again how to look—and how to coexist.

“资本主义废墟中的生活可能”（On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins）是罗安清（Anna Tsing）《末日松茸》（The Mushroom at the End of the World，2015）的副标题。工业化与城市化曾许诺繁荣，却在漫长的历史进程中留下了沉重的代价。本组影片以“进步的废墟”为题，呈现现代性留下的创伤与愈合的可能性。影片中的空间既是工厂、都市、荒原，也是记忆与政治的现场。在斯洛文尼亚的安霍沃村，石棉厂延续了百年，穿越不同政权与体制的变迁，工厂的烟雾遮蔽了生与死的界限；在米兰，树木作为“沉默的见证者”，记录着城市更新与气候变化的痕迹；在布鲁塞尔的金融危机废墟中，意外形成的沼泽滋生了新的生命与魔法；《永恒织锦》（The Perpetual Tapestry）把公共卫生、气候与金融的丝线牵连在一起，使危机的节律被织入日常。而在《陷落之地》（Sinkholes）中，我们把目光投射到未来的废墟，构建出一个因缺水而停滞的世界，让我们直面熵、后人类与灭绝的景观。现代化并非进步的单一路径，而是一条循环往复、充满裂缝的历史。城市与工业既是毁灭的起点，也是新生态的温床。在废墟中，我们重新学会凝视，重新思考如何与环境共生。

Future Ethics-3

White Veil | 白纱

Žiga Ciber | 日加·齐贝尔

2025 | 00:09:53 | Ireland, Slovenia | Slovenian | Asian Premiere

The Water Was Here | 水痕

Sophie Sherman, Némo Camus | 索菲·舍曼，内莫·卡缪

2025 | 00:17:00 | Belgium | French | Asian Premiere

Milan Arbor | 米兰树记

Maurizio Dalla Palma 毛里齐奥·达拉·帕尔马

2025 | 00:17:16 | Italy | No Dialogue | World Premiere

Translocations | 迁移

Nick Jordan 尼克·乔丹

2025 | 00:14:44 | UK | English | Asian Premiere

Sinkholes | 陷落之地

Karen Russo 凯伦·鲁索

2024 | 00:18:45 | UK | English | Asian Premiere

The Perpetual Tapestry | 永恒织锦

Simone Hooymans 西蒙娜·霍伊曼斯

2025 | 00:10:00 | Norway | No Dialogue | Asian Premiere

 The Perpetual Tapestry, Simone Hooymans, 2025

Future Ethics · Part IV 未来伦理学 第四部分

The Animal That Therefore I Am 动物故我在

In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002), Jacques Derrida begins from the moment he is seen—naked—by his cat, asking how humanity comes to know itself through the gaze of the animal. He dismantles the notion of “the Animal” as a singular abstraction, restoring it to a multitude of beings—each capable of looking back, responding, and unsettling human self-certainty.

This program takes that gaze as its point of departure: the relationship between human and animal is not one-sided but formed in the crossing of eyes. The Tigress of Manchuria retraces the path of Russian writer Nikolai Baikov through colonization, scientific exploration, and exile, reconstructing the illusion—and collapse—of the “civilized conqueror.” Jaguars wander the jungle as suspended visions of nightmare and revelation; bison on the borderlands, isolated by human political design, bring about unexpected encounters; vipers in the wilderness awaken anew within cyclical time. EX-tract confronts mass extinction with sharp brevity, while Fabulous Cow Ladies follows three generations of cows and three female veterinarians forming a gentle matriarchal alliance.

When animals are no longer confined to metaphor or ornament, they, through their presence and gaze, force humanity to recognize the limits—and violence—of its own ways of seeing, while opening the possibility of another kind of coexistence: one that is re-affirmed and re-created in the crossing of gazes. Here, we do not merely look at animals; we are looked at by them—and, in that moment, we see ourselves anew.

德里达在《动物故我在》（The Animal That Therefore I Am, 2002）中，从自己被猫注视的经验出发，追问人类在动物的目光中究竟如何认识自身。他打破了将“动物”视为抽象整体的传统，把之还原为具体的、无数差异的“动物们”——在这种视角下，动物不再是沉默的背景或象征，而是能凝视、能回应、能让人类感到羞惭甚至动摇的主体。本组影片邀请观众从这里出发：人类与动物的关系，不在于单向度的观看，而在于彼此目光交织中的再定位。《牝虎》（The Tigress of Manchuria）重走俄国作家巴依科夫在殖民、科学考察与流放之间的路径，重构出一个“自称文明的征服者”的叙事幻象及其崩塌；美洲豹在丛林中徘徊，如同悬置的梦魇与启示；边境森林里的野牛因人类的政治工程而被孤立，却带来意想不到的相遇；荒野里的毒蛇在周而复始的生命循环中生出新的觉醒。《时光之萃》（EX-tract）以简短而锋利的方式直面物种大灭绝，而在《非凡牛女郎》（Fabulous Cow Ladies）中三代奶牛与三位女性兽医结成了温柔的母系同盟。当动物不再停留于隐喻或陪衬的位置，它们以自身的存在与凝视，迫使人类意识到观看的局限与暴力，也指引出另一种可能的共生方式——一种在彼此目光中重新确认、重新生成的关系。观众不只是凝视动物，而是在被动物注视的那一刻，重新看见自己。 

Future Ethics-4

Fabulous Cow Ladies | 非凡牛女郎

Mia Halme | 米娅·哈尔默

2024 | 00:29:40 | Finland | Finnish | Asian Premiere

Jaguars | 美洲豹

Chloé Wasp 克洛艾·瓦斯普

2025 | 00:20:00 | France | Spanish | Asian Premiere

Aspis | 蝮蛇

Antonio Romagnoli | 安东尼奥·罗马尼奥利

2025 | 00:15:00 | Italy | Interlingue | Asian Premiere

EX-tract | 时光之萃

Marcel Barelli 马塞尔·巴雷利

2025 | 00:03:04 | Switzerland | French | Asian Premiere

Bloodline | 血脉

Wojciech Węglarz 沃伊切赫·文格拉日

2024 | 00:12:07 | Poland | No Dialogue | Chinese Mainland Premiere

The Tigress of Manchuria | 牝虎

Huang Jiayi 黄佳怡

2025 | 00:18:37 | China | Russian | World Premiere