The Arc of Oblivion (2024)
Director: Ian Cheney Run Time: 105 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2023
Starring: Kirsten Johnson, Werner Herzog
Country: United Kingdom, United States, France
Language: English, French
About the film:
World Premiere at SXSW 2023.
The Arc of Oblivion (2024) explores a quirk of humankind: in a universe that erases its tracks, we humans are hellbent on leaving a trace. Set against the backdrop of the filmmaker’s quixotic quest to build an ark in a field in Maine, the film heads far afield — to salt mines in the Alps, fjords in the Arctic, and ancient libraries in the Sahara — to illuminate the strange world of archives, record-keeping, and memory.
“In his attempt to imagine why, and how, we try to preserve memories, Cheney unearths something beautiful: We want to remember not just ourselves, but other people, and that’s what’s behind the efforts.”
–Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times
Playfully weaving stop-motion animation, spellbinding cinematography and fascinating interviews from the director’s inner circle and experts in the fields of science, culture and art — including documentarians Werner Herzog and Kirsten Johnson — The Arc of Oblivion (2024) reveals how nature inspires the human drive behind filmmaking.
About the filmmaker:
Ian Cheney is an Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker who received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University and an MFA in Film from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His short films include Two Buckets (2006), Truck Farm (2010), The Melungeons (2013), The Smog of the Sea (2016), and The Measure of a Fog (2017). He has completed ten feature documentaries, including King Corn (2007), The Greening of Southie (2008), The City Dark (2011), The Search for General Tso (2014), Bluespace (2015), The Most Unknown (2018), The Emoji Story (2019), Thirteen Ways (2019), Picture a Scientist (2020) and The Long Coast (2020). Most recently, Cheney directed The Arc of Oblivion (2024), a feature length self-reflective documentary film which premiered at SXSW Film Festival in 2023.
See our upcoming films