Hash Import 2026 05 18 12 34

The Battle of the Giants (2023)

★★★ — The Battle of the Giants (2023)

Katya Aragão's eight-minute short was produced under the Tela Digital banner and shot on location in São Tomé and Príncipe, the small island nation in the Gulf of Guinea that rarely appears in international cinema of any kind. The film frames its subject as a conflict between two species: the native Giant Obô Snail and the invasive Giant Land Snail introduced from West Africa, a tension that sits within the broader context of conservation filmmaking that gained renewed momentum through the 2010s and early 2020s. Aragão, working on a minimal production, uses the tight runtime to focus on a genuinely pressing ecological story, one specific to these islands but part of a much wider conversation about biodiversity loss and invasive species.

A-Z World Movie Tour Sao Tome & Principe https://vimeo.com/kataragao/giants?share=copy FIRST REVIEW ON LETTERBOXD I really enjoyed this short documentary. It tells the story of the Indigenous giant snails that inhabit these islands and how their population has declined by 75% in the last couple of decades thanks to invasive species and deforestation and over farming. It was well shot with incredibly beautiful cinematography and a warming accompanying soundtrack. There's something quite endearing about these creatures and I really hope this spreads awareness of them. The conservation efforts were revealed here too. Highly recommended.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-08-29

View on Letterboxd →

Related on Movies With Macca

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) arrived at a strange crossroads in American cinema: too modest to be a prestige picture, too unsettling to be a forgettable B-movie. Adapted from Jack Finney’s serialised novel The Body Snatchers and shot at Allied Artists on a budget barely

Fantastic Planet (1973)

René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973) is one of those films that doesn’t really fit anywhere: too cerebral for kids, too odd for animation festivals, too steeped in European political theory for the Saturday-morning slot, and too visually fearless to ignore. A 72-minute French–Czech co-production designed by the

Viy (1967)

Viy (1967) is a strange and almost solitary object in Soviet cinema: a horror film, an actual horror film with monsters and demons and supernatural set-pieces, in a national cinema that mostly didn’t make horror at all. Officially endorsed by Mosfilm and based on a Nikolai Gogol folktale, it

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) is the studio’s middle-period work par excellence: technically polished, commercially tested, narratively cautious, and just slightly off. Made between two of Disney’s commercial successes (Cinderella in 1950, which had rescued the studio from one of its periodic financial near-misses, and Peter Pan

Read more

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Fantastic Planet (1973)

Viy (1967)

Alice in Wonderland (1951)