“What makes Humboldt USA so effective is the way Svatek parallels these three stories with the themes of colonialism and technology.”

Playing in this year’s Visions du Réel festival’s International Feature Competition is Humboldt USA, the latest documentary from G. Anthony Svatek, and his first feature-length film. His previous longest work, .TV, ran only twenty-two minutes, making this a significant leap in scale and ambition. With Humboldt USA, Svatek explores the influence of nineteenth-century Prussian intellectual and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt on the American myth, while also questioning how that legacy has been distorted and selectively remembered. In doing so, Svatek crafts a documentary that critiques colonialism, industrialization, and technology, while asking whether modern society has distorted Humboldt’s deeper vision of ecological interconnectedness. With this first feature, Svatek emerges as a major new voice in documentary cinema, one of intellect and dexterity.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was among the most influential figures of his century. He published dozens of books, traveled across continents, and corresponded with an enormous network of scientists, politicians, and writers. In 1804, after four years traveling through South America and Mexico, Humboldt spent six weeks in the United States. During that brief visit, through exchanges with figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Humboldt helped shape American ideas about nature, exploration, and national identity. He believed that everything in the natural world was connected including climate, animals, plants, geography, and humanity. Because of this influence, his name spread widely across maps, species, and institutions, particularly in the Americas. Rivers, counties, bays, glaciers, penguins, squids, and lilies, among many other things, all have his name attached to them.  Few historical figures have as much.

Yet Humboldt’s influence faded over time. His admirer Charles Darwin became the more dominant figure, and Darwin’s theories of competition and natural selection often overshadowed Humboldt’s emphasis on balance and interdependence. Though Humboldt receded from mainstream historical attention, his legacy remained embedded in how modern societies think about science, land, and the environment. In Humboldt USA, Svatek investigates three American places bearing Humboldt’s name and uses them to examine what remains of Humboldt’s ideas in the landscapes, infrastructures, and technologies of the present.

The first of these locations is Humboldt County, Nevada. Here, two wildlife biologists use helicopters to capture bighorn sheep from remote mountain terrain before relocating them to reservation lands and giving them satellite-tracking collars. The footage is at once didactic but also thematically unsettling as a display of conservation through force, surveillance, and technological control. At the same time, Svatek shows the sheep as a local emblem, appearing in statues, logos, and decorative imagery. The animal is revered symbolically while brutalized materially. In one of the film’s most devastating sequences, one biologist watches social-media footage of a celebrity hunter killing a bighorn sheep for sport. The comments while watching this video praise the accuracy of the shot rather than questioning the act itself. Svatek does not need to editorialize. The contradiction is clear: a culture that celebrates the image of nature while applauding its destruction through social media and rifle technologies. 

The second location is Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, New York. What was once envisioned as connective infrastructure to lower commute times to the center of the city now stands as a monument to disconnection. The highway carved through neighborhoods and destroyed a once-vibrant greenspace and replaced communal life with lanes of traffic, pollution, and noise. Residents speak of how children no longer gather there, how neighbors no longer meet in the same ways, and how a social fabric was cut apart in the name of efficiency. The irony is sharp as the parkway that was built to connect people faster has left many feeling more isolated. Svatek smartly links this physical fragmentation to newer forms of alienation such as digital technology which deepens loneliness and destroys human connection. The segment becomes explicitly political through footage of debates involving New York Governor Kathy Hochul and competing visions for what restoration or redesign of the parkway might look like. Here, the film broadens into a critique of postwar American planning and the worship of convenience and misunderstood “greenspace” at the expense of community.

The third segment turns to the Humboldt Redwoods of California. In this section, Svatek follows researchers, conservationists, and park rangers who attempt to preserve one of the planet’s most extraordinary ecosystems. Engineers Chris Birke and Emily Soward place dozens of advanced cameras throughout the forest, attempting to create vast visual datasets of the redwoods and their surrounding life. Their hope is to train artificial intelligence not on commercialized human data, but on nature itself. Meanwhile, ranger Griff Griffith uses TikTok to educate viewers on the troubled history of the Redwood Coast, though he must navigate opaque algorithms that suppress or distort his messages. Again, Svatek remains balanced but skeptical of technology, as it can enlighten, preserve, and help communicate ideas, while also censoring and commodifying. 

What makes Humboldt USA so effective is the way Svatek parallels these three stories with the themes of colonialism and technology. Even while the colonial and industrial age has passed, the influence on the modern world persists.  Technology keeps evolving, but is it a benefit to the world?  Is this evolution Darwinism and his survival of the fittest, or is it more interconnectedness?  

This tension between Humboldt and Darwin quietly structures the film.  As colonialists cut down forests, redirected rivers, displaced communities, and industrialized landscapes, were they doing so as a survival of the fittest and to spread their biological code, or were they permanently damaging an interconnected world and changing weather patterns and the earth’s ecosystem? Without being derisive, Svatek suggests Humboldt may be as urgent now as Darwin ever was.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is Svatek’s own passion for his subject. His narration opens the documentary with clear affection and intellectual admiration toward Humboldt. The film feels personal to him, and not in a self-indulgent way, but in the sense that he genuinely sees Humboldt as a guide to understanding the present. That sincerity elevates the project. His ability to weave these stories into a larger meditation on ecology and modernity is impressive, especially for a first feature. With Humboldt USA, Svatek has made a thoughtful, political, and often surprising documentary. It challenges triumphalist narratives of technology, interrogates colonial modernity, and revives a thinker whose ideas may be more necessary now than ever. It is an assured debut feature and marks Svatek as one of the most compelling new voices in nonfiction cinema.