Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival

The Earth Is Young takes as its starting point a series of interviews conducted with Young Earth Creationists, who find evidence of a six-day, six-thousand-year-old creation in their reading of the fossil and geological record. The film frames these encounters with depictions of the slow and patient work of young paleontologists, and the strange, shimmering life in a drop of pond water, both of which point toward a world far older and more complex, if no less fantastic. Bordering on a kind of science-fiction film, The Earth Is Young is an essay about the nature of science, and about the tools, both physical and ideological, with which one builds a model of the world.

A 70-year old man living in a remote part of Scotland has been obsessed with ’trying to really understand’ Darwin’s book for many years. Alongside this passion, he’s been constantly working on small inventions for making his life easier. The film investigates someone profoundly interested in human beings, but who has decided to live separately from the majority of them.