COINCIDENCE IN PARADISE

"Why do human beings exist?" This fundamental mystery forms the backbone of this incisive documentary from Swiss filmmaker Matthias von Gunten. Far from a dusty history lesson, von Gunten's film takes us back to the dawn of human existence, to look at the precise mechanisms involved in evolution, and to locate the exact moment our ancestors started on the path from ape to something-more-than-ape. What was it that propelled them on this path? Is evolution a completely random process, or are there signs that Νature intended it that way? These questions are tackled in the film by some of today's most influential scholars working on research into prehistoric man. Among them: Kamoya Kimeu, the world's foremost fossil collector; Maeve Leakey, the paleontologist responsible for some of the most significant finds to do with our prehistoric origins; Christopher Boesch, a Swiss biologist doing research on chimpanzees; and Elizabeth Vrba, professor of paleontology, who, in Botswana, conducted studies into the habitat of our earliest ancestors. In deserts, primeval forests and laboratories, Matthias von Gunten's film delves with these research scholars into the million years of the history of our origins, relentlessly seeking the answer to the question of what it was that initiated our species so long ago.