Mushroom foragers often say the mushroom finds you. In my case, mushrooms found me just as I was searching for ways to counteract the apocalyptic narratives of the present.

The apocalyptic story is one we know all too well: genocide, mass extinctions and climate emergencies. If we are to imagine other possible futures, we must imagine other kinds of stories.

This film begins by listening to fungi.

Fungi challenge our preconceived notions of the world. They invite us to look beyond the surface, adapt, respect imperfections, and different forms of life. They suggest that there is renewal in the very death and decay that we humans are conditioned to fear.

I aim to create a cinema of interdisciplinary alliances: a collaboration between foragers, Indigenous communities, scientists, filmmakers, artists, and fungi. Cinema allows us to inhabit other points of view and forms of being. I seek to shift the narrative from extraction to collaboration. Much of the science fiction I encounter remains anthropocentric and patriarchal. In the imaginative fiction of women, I discovered possibilities that felt more hopeful, less linear, and more nuanced. Afrofuturist and Indigenous science fiction writers imagine futures grounded in interspecies cooperation and planetary repair, one where the future is not detached from the past; it is in dialogue with it.

The spirit of sci-fi that inspires this film draws from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction", away from conquest and domination, toward community, process, and care. As a filmmaking team, we use the word quest carefully. Traditional quest narratives, shaped by the Hero’s Journey, are tethered to swords, battles, monsters, and a troubling disregard for collateral damage. Ours are quests that lead to questions rather than conquests—journeys that gather instead of conquer.

The film centers on women in Mexico who work with mushrooms, combining scientific training with ancestral knowledge to demonstrate the applications of fungi for sustainability. With this film, we aim to amplify these voices and ensure they are included in global conversations on ecology, regeneration, and the future.

Our world cannot be lost for lack of imagination. Both in cinema and in life, can we move beyond the Hero's Journey toward another kind of story, one more attuned to interdependence, responsibility, and the fragile realities of our time?

– Otilia Portillo Padua, 2026