Summer Grass Winter Worm - Martin Saxer & Matjaž Pinter

Each spring, Himalayan families climb to 5000 meters in search of the caterpillar fungus. This parasitic organism grows out of a caterpillar larva and has become the most valuable in the world. Worth up to €100,000 per kilo, it sustains precarious livelihoods in Nepal while feeding China’s hunger for health, wealth and biotech innovation. What does this unlikely journey reveal about the fragile ties between ecology and economy?

Filmmaker-anthropologists Martin Saxer and Matjaž Pinter will present an exclusive preview of the film (to be released in 2026), bringing together years of fieldwork in the Himalayas and lived experience. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the directors on how filmmaking itself can act like foraging: a way to notice, collect and make visible the hidden connections across mountains, markets and ambitions.

Martin Saxer is a filmmaker and anthropologist with a PhD from Oxford University. He leads the ERC project Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. His latest documentary, Murghab (2019), premiered at the Locarno Film Festival.

Matjaž Pinter is a visual anthropologist studying political ecology and rural economies in the Himalayas. Based at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, his work combines film and photography to explore how changing ecologies reshape mountain life. He has directed four ethnographic films, including Mushroom at the Top of the World (2021).

This even is part of The Foragers series.