A Shape of Things to Come (2020)

Sundog lives out in the Sonora Desert on the Mexican border. He is an elderly gentleman, who lives off anything that the brutal nature gives him, be it a wild boar or the psychedelic poison of a toad. 'A Shape of Things to Come' gives precedence to the sensory materiality of the desert instead of to explanations and dialogue, and moves beyond the human scale and down to animal perspectives. It creates a world that stretches from a distant past in the ecological movements of the 1960s to a possible future in the aftermath of the apocalypse. But the border patrol agents are threatening the peace in Sundog's desert kingdom, which the armed recluse is prepared to defend. Lisa Marie Malloy and J.P. Sniadecki's film is equal parts 'Walden' and Western, but the magnificent isolation stands in paradoxical contrast to the great, smouldering problems of our times. With the desert as the ultimate existential (and cinematic) setting, the film shows the relationship between humanity and nature at a critical time, when civil disobedience is the provocative answer to the most pressing questions.