The elegant, humorous, susurrating Welsh voice of Siân Phillips sets the keynote for this whimsical essay documentary from Belgian film-maker Sofie Benoot about the nature of rock and stone, and the mysterious interrelation between our bodies and the landmass of Earth.
Benoot’s starting point is the kidney stone that has just been removed from her body, an intriguingly smooth and worn pebble; it’s a personal event she assigns to her offscreen alter ego, voiced by Phillips. This quasi-fictional narrator musingly notes that once upon a time she provided the voice for nature documentaries; quite true, Phillips has indeed narrated some nature documentaries, which appears to be the reason why Benoot cast her.
Phillips/Benoot ranges far afield, talking to ecologists and geologists all over the world about the nature of stone and kidney stones in particular, which contain the mineral weddellite, so named as it is found at the bottom of the Weddell Sea off Antarctica. “How on earth did an Antarctic mineral end up in my body?” she wonders. She talks to people on the island of Fogo, Cape Verde, to stonemasons in the Palestinian territories, to experts in California and also in the UK, including Professor Lorna Dawson who is a forensic soil specialist whose expertise is helpful in the solving of crimes.
The movie is the occasion for some meditations of the nature of geological time: to those that understand it, stone is as dramatically churned up as a stormy ocean; our history is written in stone and also gives us, not merely an enigmatic guide to our past but perhaps also to our “deep future”. This is a diverting film – and I think there is scope for a CSI-type drama about Professor Dawson’s work.
