Radical Mycology Convergence: Sept. 24–27, 2026 | Mulino, OR

Kauai Fungi Project 2026

Kauai Fungi Project 2026

2026 |USA |13:54 |English

Aaron Hilliard of Mushroom Wonderland goes to Kaua'i in early 2026 to follow a team of PhD mycologists into the native forests. It highlights what it looks like to collect potentially rare fungi, to do the whole process of DNA sequencing from start to finish. The video also highlights some of the most brilliant mycologists and their efforts to study the diversity of fungi.

Kauai Fungi Project 2026
Mushroom Wonderland
Aaron Hilliard
MEET THE DIRECTOR

Aaron Hilliard

Creator of Mushroom Wonderland and a mycology educator, Aaron Hilliard produced and directed the film.

SEE MORE FROM 2026

Kingdom Fungi

Kingdom Fungi

Set across diverse and changing habitats in Southern England, the film reveals the science of identification, the ecological processes unfolding beneath our feet, global environmental policy, and the personal stories that drive each character’s devotion. The journey extends internationally—following a botanical artist exhibiting at the Reino Fungi Festival, with insight from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Fungi Foundation. The film also takes us on a special fungi photography expedition to the Himalayan foothills, guided by the National Mushroom Centre, to explore the largely undocumented species of the temperate rainforests of Bhutan. Kingdom Fungi reveals fungi as a vast and largely under-researched kingdom that continues to shape life on Earth in ways we are only just beginning to understand.

2026 |UK |1:37:00 |English
Allpa Ukundi, Ñukanchi Pura: Underground, Around, & Among Us

Allpa Ukundi, Ñukanchi Pura: Underground, Around, & Among Us

The Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku call upon the beings of the more-than-human world in a new effort to defend their territory and remind the world that the rainforest is alive, and that everyone who inhabits it is interconnected. This is the story of an encounter between an Indigenous community and a collective of mycologists, artists, and lawyers that reveals that ancestral wisdom is not a myth, but the essential knowledge needed to protect the Amazon rainforest.

2025 |Ecuador, Colombia, USA |35:26 |Spanish, English
Forestible: On the Trail of Northern Wild Edibles

Forestible: On the Trail of Northern Wild Edibles

Deep in Quebec’s boreal forests, an often-overlooked world of food and knowledge is waiting to be rediscovered. Guided by Yvan Perreault, a self-taught mycologist and forest-farming specialist, Forestible travels through the seasons to explore edible wild mushrooms, native plants, and emerging forms of forest agriculture. Along the way, mushroom gatherers, chefs, and permaculture practitioners share their knowledge and their intimate connection with the land. Through contemplative cinematography and immersive sound, the film reveals the forest as both a living pantry and a fragile ecosystem. Blending documentary observation with the sensibility of an art film, Forestible invites viewers to slow down and look again at what grows around them. It offers a gentle and hopeful vision of food resilience and a more respectful relationship between people and the living world.

2024 |Canada |1:16:49 |French
Fungi Dreams

Fungi Dreams

This short film explores surreal and unsettling worlds where the boundaries between predator and prey dissolve, creating a constantly shifting perception of reality. I wanted to create an immersive journey into a dark, hypnotic universe, using black-and-white animation to emphasize the raw, primal energy of the imagery. Rough lines and tactile textures reflect the unstable and incomplete nature of these visions, evoking mystery and unease. The narrative unfolds as a psychedelic, paranoid spiral, creating disorientation and alienation while reflecting the subconscious chaos beneath reality. Inspired by jazz and progressive music, the soundtrack enhances the unpredictability and psychological tension of the journey. Together, sound and visuals create a dreamlike world that explores power, transformation, identity, and the cyclical nature of existence.

2026 |Italy |3:01
Humusities: On Soil, Extractivisms, Death and Regeneration

Humusities: On Soil, Extractivisms, Death and Regeneration

Humusities proposes a slow immersion into the living fabric of the soil as a space of coexistence between life and death. The work rehearses a politics of attention that opposes the spectacle economy, inviting us to inhabit slowness and to listen to the invisible rhythms of matter and its transformations. Filmed in regenerative gardens, mushroom farms, timber operations, and industrial monocultures, the project maps an affective topography of land use, from the domestic to the industrial. Sound, captured through contact microphones and deep geophones, acts as a subterranean narrator, while music generated from the electrical data of plants and fungi returns the landscape to its own inner vibration. Humusities reflects on the need to coexist with what dies and to allow it to decay in the common soil: ideas, bodies, systems. Decomposition appears as fertile labour rather than an end, evoking the possibility that every ruin contains a form of rebirth. How we come to consider the soil—the humus from which we come and to which we shall return—will ultimately determine our future on this planet.

2026 |Spain |10:31 |English
Matsutake Lead the Way

Matsutake Lead the Way

"Matsutake Lead the Way" is an experimental short film co-produced by anthropologist Shiho Satsuka and multimedia artist Liu Yi, commissioned by the Nieuwe Instituut. Blending Satsuka's fieldwork with frame-by-frame hand-drawing and digital geometry, Liu created an animation from tens of thousands of traditional Chinese brush paintings on rice paper. The film traces landscape evolution from geological time to the present, focusing on the Japanese matsutake fungus. It illustrates how matsutake aids pine regeneration after natural and human disturbances. By weaving above-ground human activities with underground multispecies interactions, the film demonstrates how fungi lead toward multispecies cohabitation, making a significant contribution to environmental anthropology and more-than-human ethnography.

2025 |China, Japan |9:30
Morana

Morana

The project grew from a desire to get closer to the mysterious world of mushrooms and explore it through a playful artistic approach. The visual language was inspired by notes and observations about the different stages of fungal life, which were translated into hand-drawn movement and abstract imagery. Its soundscape was created using recordings made with real fungi and a contact microphone, capturing tiny vibrations and sounds that are normally beyond our hearing. These recordings became part of the film’s imagined fungal world, giving the mushrooms a voice of their own.

2026 |Ukraine, Finland |3:33
Regrowth

Regrowth

There is a kaleidoscopic beauty to the rich micro landscape of lichens. These organisms are like miniature ecosystems, complex and diverse. The beauty of lichens is what drew April Windle to them. April is one of just a handful of professional lichenologists in the UK, spending her time studying a lifeform that goes unnoticed by most people. In this short film – Regrowth – April reflects on how, when she experienced a period of mental health crisis, her love for lichens gave her a window back to the beauty in the world, and a way back to balance.

2026 |UK |4:52 |English
The Bloom

The Bloom

We walk through the woods looking up, completely oblivious to the ancient magic beneath our feet. Mushrooms are merely the fleeting fruits of a vast, hidden kingdom whose true body breathes in the dark. This cinematic journey captures the awakening of microscopic spores into mycelium—a brainless, vibrant internet that senses, maps, and heals its environment. By trading nutrients and whispering to trees, this global nervous system reveals a profound truth: we do not control nature, we are seamlessly woven into the exact same fabric.

2026 |Nepal |4:21
The Dreams of the Last Drum

The Dreams of the Last Drum

The Dreams of the Last Drum narrates a collective dream to repair the territories damaged by modernity. The film follows the walk of a spirit of ancestral resistance that moves through different planes of space and time. It is set in a Patagonian forest, a spiritual landscape with neither beginning nor end, neither above nor below, only a multispecies walk for life where multiple worlds coexist. We see how the boundaries between nature and technology, between dream and reality, between life and death blur, creating a threshold, a polyphonic chorus of decomposition where states overlap. We witness the energetic attempts of a group of girls to connect with the hidden messages of the earth, of a dying ecosystem trying to regenerate itself. Communication occurs through vibrational waves, generative sounds and ancestral chants that arrive through dreams (pewmas), helping them balance the world and decompose the contaminated systems left by modernity, while welcoming new forms of life. When their physical bodies rest, their püllü (spirits) begin to walk.

2026 |Argentina |22:00 |Spanish
Bed Rot Song

Bed Rot Song

In 'bed rot song', a figure lies in their bed, covered by a blanket while they scroll through an endless cycle of "doom" on their phone. Mushrooms grow out of their body and their eyes. Suddenly, the door slams open and their cat aggressively calls on them to pet her while she eats. The film credits end with the figure, revealed to have a mushroom head, petting their cat while she eats. This original song and animation was inspired by personal experience, it's hard to fully bed rot when your cat is demanding attention. It serves as a reminder to myself to help others if I am feeling helpless myself.

2026 |USA |0:33 |English
Fire in My Pocket

Fire in My Pocket

A little boy, bored with building a bed, longs for something more exciting. One day, a mischievous fire creature appears, luring him away from his chores, and despite his father’s repeated attempts to maintain order, the boy follows his new friend into a magical mushroom world where anything is possible. They fly, spark fires, and explore without limits, discovering the thrill, chaos, and wonder of adventure. When the boy realizes the mischief has gone too far, he returns home, finishing the bed in his own creative way and earning his father’s proud embrace. Combining 2D and stop-motion animation with experimental techniques, the film features real, growing mushrooms and playful, handcrafted elements that highlight the beauty of imperfection and the tactile quality of materials, while creating a magical, visually inventive world that explores desire, crossing of boundaries, and self-discovery.

2026 |Hungary |10:02 |English
Mycelium

Mycelium

Amber Grove, a rural mushroom cultivator loses her partner of ten years to an unexpected suicide. The dark cloud over her life begins to lift when an eccentric customer mentions that his brother claims to have talked to his late wife after taking an unidentified psychoactive mushroom. Amber decides to embark on a roadtrip in hopes of finding the mushroom to reconcile the pit of pain growing inside of her. However, once she finds the mushroom - it is not at all as she expected - but what she needed...

2026 |USA |17:31 |English
Nature's Bounty: Mushroom Hunters of the Zambian Miombo

Nature's Bounty: Mushroom Hunters of the Zambian Miombo

In Zambia’s spectacular Miombo woodlands, the rains bring an extraordinary bounty of wild mushrooms. For generations, local villagers have known where to find them, which to eat and how to preserve them — knowledge woven into the rhythm of life. Nature’s Bounty follows these expert fungi hunters alongside fungi photographer Stephen Axford and mycologist Professor Peter Mortimer as they explore this remarkable fungal world. Here, mushrooms provide vital food and income and are part of an intricate fungal web essential to the forest itself. But the Miombo is disappearing as trees are cleared for agriculture and charcoal. Could wild mushrooms offer communities a sustainable livelihood — and give the forest greater value if left standing? Nature’s Bounty is a story of fungi, traditional knowledge and the hope that protecting one might help secure the future of them all.

2026 |Zambia |18:30 |English
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