In this nature documentary, a Danish journalist sets out to find at least one of every one of the sixty species of butterfly in her home country, in one year. Along the way she waxes eloquent about the transience of life, metamorphosis, the interconnectedness of all life forms on earth, the destructiveness of Homo sapiens, and the meaning of life. She quotes from various philosophers and religious scholars, and seems to embrace a somewhat nebulous spirituality, bemoaning the myth of continuous human progress and the rapacious destruction of the natural world that inevitably accompanies the dominance of humans over all other life forms.
She joins other butterfly enthusiasts, and invokes the long history of metamorphosis, and butterflies in particular, in the lives and thinking of many scholars and philosophers from Ovid to Freud.
For those readers like me who are geographically challenged, a full page map of Denmark and it’s many islands would have been useful as we follow her around the country, in her searching.
4.2/5
Thank, The Economist
