TROM II: A Message to the Aliens
Year: 2023 / Duration: 4 parts, 5 hours
We live in a world where everyone is busy, everyone is consumed, everyone seems confused. Money, social credits, ads, data collection, prices and billionaires. Climate change? Who cares!
A one-marble world, floating in a giant soup of stars and planets, clustered in donut-shaped galaxies.
What are these humans living for?
In a 5 hour, 4 parts documentary, we try to explore their world, to understand what makes them human, what makes them enslave their kind, destroy their habitat, and be unaware of their place in this universe. But also what makes them so special.
Through the lives of 5 humans, we look at the culture that creates them, their struggles growing up on this planet, and where they are headed toward.
1. HUMANS
What does Romania, Russia, Latvia, Germany, and the United States have in common? A planet, and the human imagination. We imagine borders, nationalities, and differences. In truth we are all very much the same. We grow up in a culture, we watch the same TV, listen to the same music, follow similar traditions. We are “educated” and “trained” by institutions that are rarely questioned by the masses.
So how does a newborn human become someone in this culture of humans? And how does the human-invented world contrast with the vast universe we are part of?
2. SOCIETY
Despite what most people may believe, the human society, from China to the US, from Europe to Africa, and everywhere else, is based primarily, if not entirely, on a practice that dates back thousands of years. That practice dictates how humans treat others and the environment around them. What movies they make, what books they write, what products they create, who and what they care about, and what they prioritize.
From science to entertainment, or the day to day life, this old practice is a force that all humans are slaves to.
3. EARTH
There is only one, and one only. A few kilometers of crust layered with a few kilometers of atmosphere. A seemingly endless variety of plants and animals. And yet, the 8 billion humans inhabiting it are naively ignoring the fragility of this ecosystem. If Earth was an island, it would be the only one in a vast empty ocean.
Humans are the rulers of this world, with no corner left untouched by them. Rulers who think that they might be exempt from the rest of nature. But the destruction of this habitat is starting to have consequences that are impossible to ignore.
4. HOPE
Despite the fact that humans have created so much misery, so much destruction, so many mountains of waste, and wasted so many brains for the past thousands of years, there is some hope in sight. But to understand and harness that hope, they must take a giant step back and look at their society from an alien perspective.
They have to let go of what they think is normal and try to undress the layered society they have created, to see the naked reality behind it all. Only then can hope be understood. Only then, the understanding of hope can become the bedrock for change.