In Search of Truth

In this short documentary, director Carme Puche is trying to outline the personality of American scientist Lynn Margulis. The director intelligently uses testimonials of different personalities contemporary with the scientist that were either friends or colleagues with her, to put together bits of memories that define her personal or professional character. It seems Lynn Margulis was an unpopular but very talented scientist who developed a new revolutionary theory about evolution and is oftenly compared by her colleagues with scientist like Charles Darwin and others of the same statute both as vision and knowledge and as scientific marginalisation during their times due to her courageous ideas.

A strong aspect of Carme Puche’s documentary is the fiction reconstruction of young Lynn’s little pleasure of swimming in the cold waters of a pond. While each interviewed person describes their own memories about Lynn Margulis, the parallel edit presents us the young woman traveling by car together with her dog until she reaches a pond where she goes swimming. We found this a very nice way of ending the story: by presenting the most pregnant attributes of the scientist’s personal side: her energy and free spirit.

Somehow you can feel that these attributes were the engine that drove her initiative in her research and that inspired and favoured her discovering. This little fictive reconstruction in symbiosis with the documentary side of the film has the power to shape and project a phantasmagorical silhouette of Lynn Margulis in the viewer’s imagination.

‘In Search Of Truth’ is not only a successful portrait of the personality it treats but it is also a factor of awareness about Lynn Margulis’ existence. As it is symbolically entitled ‘In search of truth’ it unobtrusively suggests the price paid for the search of truth: anonymity and marginalisation.

We invite whoever is now curious about Lynn Margulis to watch this short, exceptional documentary.

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