Powaqqatsi

Synopsis

This film is the follow-up to director Godfrey Reggio's dazzling Koyaanisqatsi - and is similarly made up of a series of impressionistic moving images, sometimes shocking, at other times beautiful, of the world around us, set to a hypnotic Philip Glass score. But while that film was subtitled "Life Out of Balance" and depicted the western world, Powaqqatsi (the word means, roughly,"parasite') is "Life in Transformation" - and concentrates on the industrialisation of the developing world, where many of the rituals and traditions shown here are disappearing fast.