San Francisco Documentary Festival 2009

The Earth Is Young is a rare film that uses a mesmerizing and serene experimental style to document one of Christianity's most controversial concepts: that our earth is no older than mankind. Gitlin juxtaposes interviews of Scientific Creationists with the slow and patient work of young paleontologists, and the strange, shimmering life in a drop of pond water. Bordering on a kind of science-fiction film, The Earth Is Young is an essay about the nature of science, and about the tools, both physical and ideological, with which one builds a model of the world.