PRODUCTIONS: THE THREE MINUTES OF MAN

DIRECTOR

PRODUCER

DURATION

VERSIONS

FORMAT

Lodovico Prola

Ditta Prola

40'

SD

Our story starts from a tail recounted by a grandfather to his grandchild: the story of our planet, and of how human presence changed it forever. In an attempt to put the whole history of our planet into a dimension comprehensible by the kid, he decided to compare the whole history of our planet to a week, each day lasting 770 million years.

Day after day, they’ll discover how life appeared on Earth, and its evolution: from the most ancient and simple forms of life that populated our oceans, to the appearance and mysterious extinction of the dinosaurs, from the kingdom of the reptiles to the ultimate reign of the mammals.

Our presence on Earth started on Saturday at 23:57, just three minutes before the end of the week. Man is still a primitive creature, but his hands start to use the tools he has produced for himself.

Compared to the 4.6-billion-year history of our planet, human’s presence on Earth is just a small drop in the ocean, but its impact on the ecosystem is that of a devastating tsunami. In just few fractions of a second, man emerges among all the other living creatures. He is the first to try and dominate the nature’s elements, and he’s the protagonist an evolutionary process of unprecedented speed.

Saturday: just 1/40 of second before midnight. The industrial revolution has begun. In the blink of an eye, man changed the face of our planet as no one has ever done before, this time with devastating effects. Man feels as if he is the king of the world, as if the whole complexity of nature could be easily controlled.

Suddenly, it becomes clear that something in the delicate equilibrium between man and nature has been broken. Despite that, our species continues to go on, convinced that what we’ve been doing for just an insignificant fraction in the Earth’s history, could last forever.

Midnight. The human being, a newly born creature in the whole of Earth’s history, can do nothing but look around scared for the price the planet has paid for his progress. The world, his own home and refuge, now seems as if it’s gone out of the natural rhythm of evolution, out of the slow course of Nature.