Listen Like a Banana

Composer Matthew Herbert records the sounds of a banana's formidable 4,000 mile journey from the Dominican Republic to the UK.

The banana is the world’s most eaten fruit but it is at risk of extinction. Composer and sound artist turned director Matthew Herbert attaches a microphone to a banana in the Dominican Republic and records what it hears on its journey to the UK...the sounds of disease, political interference, environmental destruction, worker exploitation and fossil fuel intensive systems.

This is an original, provocative documentary that prioritises sound over the image and proposes that to solve some of humanity’s most fundamental problems, we must start by decentralising the human perspective itself. It challenges us to listen to our seductive, destructive and often invariably invisible systems and to think about what and how we consume before it’s too late. Premiered at Aesthetica Film Festival 2023.