“Bold explorers, ardent preservationists, unknown names... What would the future be like if the last image of everything disappeared? What if one day nothing remained?” Questions are posed and answers missing in this haunting ode to recall, remembrance and loss via the decasia-like tracing of the silent (film) and the shock and awe of the unspoken (nature). Filmmaker and poet marcelo Felix sets out, for his debut feature, to restore to memory the shards of endangered and preserved nitrate and embarked on a forensic raid of archives, including lisbon’s own national moving Images archive (its vaults can be seen in the film itself). Parallel to this mission, and inspired by the recent creation of a different sort of repository, the svalbard Global seed vault, was the notion of aligning the preservation of plant species with that of moving pictures. Eden’s ark is a pastiched, collective memory bank, visceral images of the natural world in dialogue with the fragile patina of obscure and familiar excerpts (metropolis, von sternberg) and a tale of an ark hit by a giant wave to signal the fleeting nature of botanical and cinematic materiality. — madeleine molyneaux

Eden’s ark is a journey in different times. A journey made by travellers who try to cope with several rescuing missions - a forest made up of all existing plants, threatened of disappearance; a knowledge of the world and the ability to remember it; nearly lost images which must be tracked and restored - and who in the process realise the scope of their task and their limited means to achieve it. These stories are made of images new and borrowed: moments from silent and early sound films coexist with contemporary visions. We follow this journey as its travellers cross oceans and polar deserts, search through botanical gardens and film archives, lose their way in silent forests and ghost towns - confronting extinction and memory.