Antipodes: Upside Down Worlds

Where would you end up if you were to dig a tunnel straight down from one side of the world to the other? I've dreamed about this very notion since I was a kid, picturing an intersecting network of tunnels at the center of the earth, a sort of shortcut to the other side. That distance, as it turns out is about 12,000km. Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky decided to take a sort of filmic shortcut to the other side with his 2011 travelogue “¡Vivan Las Antipodas!” (Long live the Antipodes). This unhurried epic juxtaposes diametrically opposed—yet spiritually linked—spots in: Entre Rios, Argentina & Shanghai, China; Lake Baikal, Russia & Patagonia, Chile; The jungles of Botswana & the volcanic fields of Hawaii; Castle Point, New Zealand & Miraflores, Spain.

The film swirls and dissolves to an emotionally charged soundtrack flipping between the locations, which sometimes bleed into each other and at other times stand in stark, even comical contrast.

“I wonder if I should fall right through the Earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think…it didn’t sound at all the right word.” —Alice in Wonderland

Wanna find your antipode? Go here.