Seminar with Gregg Mitman about his new documentary film "Inquietude"

Inquietude (feature-length documentary, in development)

An abandoned iron-ore mine in the mist-shrouded mountains at the Liberia-Guinea border is now a mosaic landscape of defunct machinery, terraced rock, and sky island savannahs serving as a sanctuary home for threatened endemic species. INQUIETUDE introduces the West African scientists, park rangers, and forest defenders who study and protect colonizing bats, rare live-bearing toads, and tool-using chimpanzees. It’s a cast of characters whose fortunes are entangled by the weaving pressures of resurgent mining, conservation, ecotourism, and the survival of local communities. With an unflinching gaze, INQUIETUDE shows the complex alliances and tensions that define a delicate balance between industry and ecology, wherein a tiny mountain toad has the power to pause a billion-dollar mining operation.

Gregg Mitman is a guest professor at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, and Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Many of you will remember that Gregg gave a fascinating presentation on infrastructures of extraction and endangerment in West Africa, bringing together a bat, a virus, a mountain, ecotourism, iron ore extraction and the American-Liberian-Swedish mining company LAMCO, in a SPHERE seminar in late 2023 when work with the film was in progress.