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Plays in Shorts Program: Vanishing Point
Saturday, June 13
5:45 PM - 7:15 PM

Regal Gallery Place

701 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001

for all screenings

Plant Life

Co-Directors

Brett Marty, Joshua Izenberg

Co-Producer

HHMI Tangled Bank Studios

Associate Producer

Tate Lancaster

Editor

Aldona Watts

Co-Editor

Aldona Watts

Cinematographer

Phil Briggs

Composer

Amanda Jones

Animator

Global Mechanic

At once intimate and urgent, PLANT LIFE follows Joanne Chory, the scientist who helped rewrite the rules of plant biology and is now racing to use those breakthroughs to confront climate change. In the 1980s, Chory transformed the field by proving that plants could be genetically reprogrammed — a discovery that reshaped how scientists understand plant life.

Now, living with Parkinson’s disease as the climate crisis accelerates, Chory has turned her life’s work toward the planet’s most urgent challenge: re-engineering crops with deeper, carbon-rich roots capable of locking away CO₂ for centuries. PLANT LIFE is both a deeply human portrait and a scientific race against time, following a woman who believes the key to our survival may lie beneath our feet.

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Brett Marty

Co-director, Plant Life

Brett Marty began his career as a commercial director before transitioning into filmmaking with several documentary projects and his narrative directorial debut, YOUTH, which won multiple jury awards and screened at more than 30 festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival. His recent documentary work has been commissioned or featured by Patagonia, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and National Geographic.

Before filmmaking, he studied ceramic sculpture at University of California, Berkeley, drove from San Francisco to Argentina in an old Buick, and helped Nate Silver launch FiveThirtyEight in 2008. His recent work includes GAME HAWKER (2022) for Patagonia Films and ECO-HACK!, which won Best Short Documentary awards at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Palm Springs International ShortFest, and Interfilm Berlin, and premiered with The New Yorker in 2023.

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Joshua Izenberg

Co-director, Plant Life

Josh Izenberg is a documentary filmmaker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His film SLOMO (2013) won more than a dozen awards, including Best Short Documentary at South by Southwest Film Festival, premiered as a The New York Times Op-Doc, and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards. His subsequent film, the Netflix Original RESURFACE, won the Jury Prize at the Tribeca Festival and was nominated for an Emmy. Since then, he has co-directed the documentaries GAME HAWKER (2022) for Patagonia Films and ECO-HACK!, which won an Audience Award at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and premiered with The New Yorker in 2023.

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