In the shadow of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano, a young girl, Manu, and her mother lovingly breed a colony of bees. Meanwhile, as Manu’s activist father protests the construction of a giant telescope on the mountain’s sacred ground, a group of scientists study the landscape in preparation for our inevitable relocation to Mars. Ambitiously linking the earthbound and the cosmic, the intimate and the expansive, director Sarah J. Christman tracks these existentially fraught narratives with an acute attention to time, scale, and historical consequence. As her monumental images gather force, Swarm Season takes on a potent allegorical dimension.

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