‘We anchored on a wild adventure!’ Tilda Swinton on her trippy film about learning, artificial intelligence and neuroscience | Sheffield Doc/Fest

This is a film about learning, full of questions with not many answers,” announces Tilda Swinton at the start of her new documentary, The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze. “It was imagined by Derek Jarman’s lab between 2016 and 2042, in conversations with thinkers both living and not, a caterpillar and an algorithm or two.”

It’s a useful warning that the film, co-directed by Swinton with Bartek Dziadosz, is not a conventional piece of storytelling or analysis. The words “dream” are telling, too, because The Hexagonal Hive – which premieres at Sheffield DocFest this week – has the floating, free-flowing feel of a dream. Collect ideas about neuroscience, education and the world of work and create a sensory collage including images from Scotland, Bangladesh and West Africa, with gnomic titles such as: “What a machine is the world – how to work its tools?” It also features the voices of academics and children, as well as clips from Night of the Hunter and My Neighbor Totoro.

The film follows the practices of traditional societies with one eye on the AI ​​revolution that threatens to upend the modern world. ChatGPT, Midjourney and Synthesia are all mentioned in the credits; an AI-created avatar addresses us at various points; and a researcher from 2042 sends us dispatches from the future. It’s quite a convoluted, beguiling and thought provoking trip.

“We knew from the beginning,” says Swinton, “that what we were most interested in was our own curiosity about the subject, and that we wanted to avoid jumping to any conclusions. We wanted to accurately represent the “thought cloud” type of our rambling conversations. And the more we explore the range and disparate unseen alleys and byways of our wonders, the more aware we become that a film mapping our inarticulateness might look something like a learning machine, even an unconscious mind, that fight.”

The film is the second feature from the Derek Jarman Lab – the production and editing center at Birkbeck, University of London, named after the great avant-garde director with whom Swinton worked on nine films, including her 1986 debut Caravaggio. She remembers Jarman as a “great encourager,” whose collective approach to film inspired the lab’s work — including Swinton and Dziadosz’s previous documentary, The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger in 2016.

The Hexagonal Hive has had time to evolve, starting with footage shot in 2016-17 at Drumduan, the Steiner school in Scotland that Swinton helped found and sent her own children to. These scenes offer insight into his unconventional approach, where teaching practical skills such as building the six-sided frame of the film’s title is favored over rote learning and exams. The directors then traveled to Bangladesh where they visited schools and a tea estate. They later added material from Ghanaian director Anita Afonu, including a stunning sequence in which two boys build a basket with amazing skill.

As the project developed, the filmmakers began to think of the film “as a story or a poem about learning,” says Dziadosz. Contributing to the conversation they wanted to generate are many different interviewee voices that are neither seen nor named as they would be in a conventional documentary, at least not until the end credits. Some are academics, others children. “It’s a way to present all these voices on the same level,” says Dziadosz. “When you can’t connect the voice with some kind of authority or credentials, you’re really listening to the substance.”

Trying to capture the peculiarity of a child’s perspective takes the film to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Swinton reads from Lewis Carroll’s book – the caterpillar mentioned at the start turns out to be Alice’s pipe-smoking interlocutor – and there are clips from Jan Švankmajer’s 1980s Czech film adaptation.

“Rabbit Fare felt like a precise place to aim for,” says Swinton. “This book has an endless capacity to disturb and resonate – especially as a record of the experience of a certain childhood slice of consciousness, with its shifts between danger and euphoria, self-doubt and posturing. We wanted to anchor that molten, uncomfortable, thrilling atmosphere of wild adventure.”

But in addition to texts from the past, the film looks at the transformative yet unsettling future promised by AI. The “Maze Mouse” of the title was an early prototype of machine learning: an electrically controlled rodent model named Theseus, who discovered how to escape a mini-maze in a 1952 experiment.

Swinton lays out the challenge clearly: “We are acutely aware that we stand on a precipice, facing a future that demands ever more urgently new thinking: about the nature of consciousness as much as about education, and what responsible education appropriate for the next few decades might look like. This chasm is severe enough for us to respect the need to examine all possible questions before jumping into the reflexive formulation of solutions. So we set ourselves a rare chance to wonder freely – a state of suspension.”

For Swinton, the revolution in no way undermines the emphasis on “flexibility and themes” that is the hallmark of the Drumduan school. “It seems to me that there is no imaginable revolution for which this essential foundation would not be invaluable,” she says. “The question of what it means to be human in the first place—before we become, as most of us are now, bionic and now in our ever-expanding landscape with its new relationships and interdependencies—seems to me to be a territory worth exploring for all of us.”