Practical
Wednesday, 12 November, 2025
- 19:00 until 22:00
Bozar
Rue Ravensteinstraat 23
1000 Brussels
Rue Ravensteinstraat 23
1000 Brussels
€8 or €6 (discount rate)
Each spring, Himalayan families climb to 5000 meters in search of the caterpillar fungus. This parasitic organism grows out of a caterpillar larva and has become the most valuable in the world. Worth up to €100,000 per kilo, it sustains precarious livelihoods in Nepal while feeding China’s hunger for health, wealth and biotech innovation. What does this unlikely journey reveal about the fragile ties between ecology and economy? This question is at the heart of the documentary Summer Grass, Winter Worm.
Filmmaker-anthropologists Martin Saxer and Matjaž Pinter will present an exclusive preview of the film (to be released in early 2027), bringing together years of fieldwork in the Himalayas and lived experience.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with the makers and moderator Joséphine Vandekerckhove on how filmmaking itself can act like foraging: a way to notice, collect and make visible the hidden connections across mountains, markets and ambitions.
Program
19:00 - Welcome and intro by Martin Saxer
19:30 - Film screening
21:00 - Discussion with Martin Saxer and Matjaž Pinter, moderated by Joséphine Vandekerckhove
22:00 - End
Tickets
Tickets are available online through the Bozar website at 6 (reduced ticket price for -26y) or 8 euro.
Get your ticket
Bios
Martin Saxer is a filmmaker and anthropologist. He obtained his PhD from Oxford University with a study on the industrialization of Tibetan medicine. His research has taken him from the borderlands of Nepal and Tibet to Central Asia, supported by fellowships at the National University of Singapore and LMU Munich. Since 2022 he has been principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant project Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. Alongside his academic work, he has directed three feature-length documentaries, of which his latest Murghab (2019) premiered at Locarno Film Festival.
Matjaž Pinter is a visual anthropologist focusing on political ecology, social movements, and rural economies in the Himalayas. He obtained his PhD after over three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Mid-Western Nepal, tracing the legacy of the Maoist revolution and the transformations brought by the lucrative caterpillar fungus trade. His work combines film and photography to document how rural life is reshaped by shifting ecologies and economies. He has directed four ethnographic films: Takasera (2016), Disenchanted Cinema (2017), Taking on the Storm (2021), and Mushroom at the Top of the World (2021). He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich.
Joséphine Vandekerckhove is a researcher, curator, and author specializing in the intersections between film and the visual arts, film history, modern art, and the contributions of women to film and visual art. She is a guest professor of Film Theory at the University of Antwerp and a curator at the arts center KAAP in Bruges and Ostend.
Part of The Foragers
In an age of urban pressure and digital acceleration, The Foragers: Engagements Beyond the Human invites us to rediscover our relationship with nature — not only in remote wilderness, but especially within the urban fabric of contemporary life. This interdisciplinary art-science project brings together artists, researchers and enthusiasts who reimagine the ancient practice of foraging as a bold, imaginative and future-facing method.
The world needs you
This initiative is part of VUB's public programme, a programme for everyone who believes that scientific knowledge sharing, critical thinking and dialogue are an important first step to create impact in the world.
As an Urban Engaged University, VUB aims to be a driver of change in the world. With our academic edcuational programmes and innovative research, we contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and to making a difference locally and globally.