Light Needs

• Duration: 72 minutes
• Director: Jesse McLean
• Country: United States
• Year: 2023
• Rating: (N/A)

Do plants have a consciousness? Not if you look at it from a human scale. But maybe it is about time we stopped always doing just that. 'Light Needs' is a generous, thought-provoking and artistically inventive film that literally expands one’s consciousness and creates a space for empathy with other life forms – namely the houseplants that most of us live with. In an unpretentious but serious and empathetic exploration of the symbiotic relationship between human and non-human beings, we learn, among other things, what it feels like to turn sunlight into glucose from the inside.

But we also meet a diverse range of people who let us in on their close and often deeply personal relationship with the plants they share their homes with. Visual artist Jesse McLean has made a free and open-minded contribution to the great current within contemporary culture which has turned to biology and the living to find new ways forward for both thought and action.