The Lanthanide Series

  • The Lanthanide_Erin_Espelie

    Erin Espelie,The Lanthanide Series, 2014, 70 minutes, Color, Sound, HD digital video & 16mm film mastered to DCP

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Past Event


This event was on Thu 14 Jun 2018, 7pm

Part poetry, part chemistry lesson, part landscape film, part cinematic exploration, part history and geography lesson, part environmental revelation, part magic. The Lanthanide Series is something new under the sun. – Scott MacDonald

Fascinating investigations into natural phenomena with a poetic approach to photography and cinematic structure that’s reminiscent of the work of Robert Beavers, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jeanne Liotta, and others. The Lanthanide Series fuses poetry and science to create a thrillingly uncategorizable work. – Anthology Film Archives

From the portals of personal computing devices to ancient obsidian mirrors, optical instruments control how people see, foresee, frame, record, and remember their lives. Erin Espeile‘s The Lanthanide Series meditates on how we understand the world through such material means, with a reliance on history, the Periodic Table, and the people we love.

Thanks to Maria Palacios Cruz and LUX

Also showing at LUX

About Erin Espelie

Erin Espelie is a writer, editor, and filmmaker, with degrees in molecular and cellular biology from Cornell University and the experimental and documentary arts from Duke University. Her poetic, nonfiction films have shown around the world at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival, the Whitechapel Gallery, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Imagine Science Film Festival, and more.

Her feature-length documentary, The Lanthanide Series, won the grand prize at the Seoul International New Media Festival in 2015; it has shown in Denmark, Portugal, the U.K. and had its New York City premiere at Anthology Film Archives in June 2016.

Espelie currently holds an assistant professorship in Film Studies and Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder; she serves as an Associate Director of the Center for Environmental Journalism and is Editor in Chief of Natural History magazine, a centenarian publication for which she has worked since 2001.