Winner of the Zeiss Cinematography Award at the SXSW 2020 Film Festival and 1st Jury Prize at the Global Tourism Film Festival, ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE turns its lens onto explorers who are pushing the human body and technology beyond known limits in the most extreme environments on Earth. It follows Al Arnold, a blind man running through the deadly deserts of Death Valley; Rachel Sussman, a photographer capturing photographs of Earth's oldest living organisms; Paul Salopek, a journalist walking across the world in the footsteps of the earliest human migrations; and scientists building machines to look back nearly to the beginning of time. These individuals are linked by their search for the fabric of our interconnectedness before it is lost in the noise of our distracted and divided world.

Meet Paul Salopek

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek has been walking over 21,000-miles across the Earth, retracing the migration paths of the first humans who discovered our planet. He began in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia — one of the most hostile landscapes on Earth that remains engulfed in tribal warfare — where the fossil record indicates humanity may have been born. He will not stop walking until he reaches the southern tip of South America, crossing the Middle East, Siberia, and the entire length of the Americas along the way.

Paul's journey — known as the "Out Of Eden Walk" — is a decades-long experiment in slowing journalism down to walking pace, unveiling a profoundly different picture of the world than we find in conventional media. Along the way, he is connecting the major stories of our time to their roots in our deep past, to create a global record of human life at the start of a new millennium as told by villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely make the news. Setting a new precedent for the future of journalism, Paul shows that by slowing down and observing carefully, we also can rediscover our world.

Meet Rachel Sussman

Rachel Sussman spent a decade traveling the world to photograph portraits of Earth's oldest continuously living organisms: creatures ranging from 2,000 to half a million years old that are still alive today. Practically half of these subjects have just been discovered in the past 30 years. Rachel’s investigations into Deep Time have resulted in an original index of millennia-old organisms that has never before been created in the arts or sciences; global symbols that transcend the things that divide us. Above, Rachel photographs 100,000 year-old sea grass in Spain and a 3,000 year-old llareta plant in the Atacama Desert of Chile.

Meet Al Arnold

Al Arnold was a pioneer of pushing the human body beyond it’s known limits. By the time he was in his 50s (and almost completely blind), he decided to accomplish the impossible: running alone all the way across Death Valley - one of the hottest and most lethal environments on Earth - in record summer temperatures, starting at the lowest point in the western Hemisphere and ending at the highest point in the continental U.S. (Mt. Whitney). His epic journey inspired the Badwater Ultramarathon, known as the “toughest footrace on Earth.”

Meet Anil Ananthaswamy

Anil Ananthaswamy has traveled to some of the most extreme environments on Earth - remote and sometimes dangerous places - where massive experiments are attempting to answer the biggest questions known to modern science. His global journeys have shed light on the unsung heroes - brave men and women - who face profound challenges to better understand who we are and our place in the universe.

Meet Losang Samten

Losang Samten was Personal Attendant to His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama from 1985 – 1988, and played himself in Martin Scorsese's film Kundun. In 1959, he and his family fled from Tibet to Nepal, spent two months crossing the Himalayas, arriving at Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India, where he became a monk and master in the Tibetan art of creating sand mandalas.

In ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE, Losang creates a 3,000 year old Kalachakra sand mandala, a map of both the cosmos and the subatomic particles of our bodies made by a painstakingly slow process of dropping particles of colored sand on a table for 8 or 9 hours a day, every day for an entire month. It is destroyed as soon as it's finished as a meditation on non-attachment and the impermanence of all things, then is dissolved in the nearest river where it flows into the world as a prayer.

Meet The Throat Singers Of Tuva

Making ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE involved traveling to remote villages in Tuva near the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China to work with musicians, shamans, hunters, and instrument builders. "Tuvan music produces sound on a sub-atomic level," says Valentina Süzükei (the world’s leading expert on Tuvan music, especially the variant known as Xöömei). "So I have come to the conclusion that Tuvans have a quantum understanding of the world around, because quantum theory suggests a vision from the whole to the partial. So it’s not just music; it’s a nanotechnology that illuminates aspects of nature we don’t always perceive. And just like technology used by physicists, its deepens Tuvans’ understanding of their place in the cosmos."

For more on Tuvan throat singing and filming in the region: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Music/Tuva/

Meet CERN's Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is the largest machine ever built and the World Wide Web was created to process its data. It's a 17 mile long microscope which is searching for extra dimensions, the "God particle," anti-matter, and forces akin to those that took place in the first trillionth of a millisecond after the Big Bang at incredibly small sizes on the order of a tenth of a thousandth of a trillionth of a millimeter. It generates a magnetic field more than 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s and temperature necessary for the LHC’s superconducting magnets to operate is the coldest extended region that we know of in the universe - even colder than outer space. The magnets contain 1,200 tons of superconducting filaments much smaller than a human hair which, if unwrapped, would be long enough to encircle the orbit of Mars. The LHC uses an amount of electricity required for a small city such as nearby Geneva. The LHC’s $9 billion price tag also makes it the most expensive machine ever built.

For more on production at CERN: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Making-ECHOES-OF-THE-INVISIBLE/CERN-Interviews-Steve-Elkins/

Meet Linda Lynch

Linda Lynch is a visual artist exploring the edges of human memory, especially through the relationship between the unconscious and landscape. She grew up in a very remote part of the Chihuahuan Desert which has since been designated as a National Park, riding horses to the surrounding petroglyphs, wooly mammoth rubbings, and sacred Apache sites that inspired Paul Salopek to walk across the globe in the footsteps of our Stone Age ancestors.

This is a landscape that fosters dreams of colossal scale. One of Linda's neighbors is building a 200-foot tall clock inside a nearby mountain, which Brian Eno has designed to chime more than 3.5 million different melodies over the next 10,000 years. Her family’s business partner sold the Roden Crater to artist James Turrell, which he's spent decades transforming into a 3-mile wide gateway for observing celestial events with the naked eye through tunnels in the cone of a 400,000-year-old volcano.

James Turrell's Roden Crater: A Gateway For Observing Celestial Events Inside The Tunnels Of A 400,000 Year-Old Volcano

Yet another neighbor — Jim Magee — has spent more than a quarter century building a massive, largely secret, 52,000 square foot "city" made from 2,400 tons of stone (comparable perhaps only to the Egyptian pyramids or temples of Mesoamerica, except made by one person), in the 2,000 acres of empty desert he's acquired outside of El Paso, Texas. For more on Jim's work: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Art/James-Magee/

For more on Linda and her neighbors: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Making-ECHOES-OF-THE-INVISIBLE/FERN-TV-Interviews-Steve-Elkins/

SOME REVIEWS

"Echoes has placed me somewhere beyond words...one of the most profound things I've seen...See this film for in a time of uncertainty and fear it puts it all into perspective...One of the tip top best films of 2020."
-Steve Kopian (Unseen Films)

“Emotionally and visually stunning”
-Medium

“Could not be more timely...an unusually transfixing movie...a path forward during uncertain times..."
-Hollywood Soapbox

“This film is an emotional experience and feels like coming home…It does what words cannot do on their own…It goes through you, straight to your core. And what remains is not a narrative but a sense of possibility and wonder…an opening of one’s heart and eyes…”
-Modern Times Review

“Echoes of the Invisible is an absolutely gorgeous look at humanity, the environment, and the way they interact and weave in these stories...some of the best cinematography in a documentary in some time.”
-Clapper (UK)

“Like Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World or Meru...Echoes gives perspective to the relative smallness and insignificance of human existence in the grand scheme of time and space, while still giving depth of purpose to life... exhilarating.”
-Vague Visages

“A cinematic mosaic equal parts spiritual, existential, and wondrous…some of the most interesting and ambitious personalities one could encounter, in cinema or otherwise.”
-Films In Frame

“Simply dazzling…brilliant…profound…This isn’t, 'Stop and smell the roses.' It’s more, 'The roses are here, there, and everywhere, and no matter what you believe, they’ll still be around when you’re not, so give it a whiff and expand your own horizons in the process.' Absolutely phenomenal.”
-Behind The Rabbit Productions