In the Veins by Camille Henrot is a meditation on care, ecological grief, and the experience of raising children in a time shaped by climate crisis and mass extinction. Rather than approaching environmental collapse as an abstract global condition, the film locates it within the intimate structures of everyday life, where love, dependency, fear, and responsibility are lived most acutely. Through a dense and associative montage, Henrot juxtaposes scenes of domestic nurturing - a baby breastfeeding, animals being cleaned and fed, gestures of touch and maintenance - with images of corporate PR, entertainment spectacles and digital technologies aimed at the masses. Across the film, acts of care appear continually interrupted by the accelerated rhythms of contemporary life.

A child’s voice attempting to read passages about catastrophe and civilisational collapse is repeatedly corrected by an automated digital voice that resembles an AI training system. This unsettling exchange collapses education, technological mediation, and emotional conditioning into a single structure, suggesting a future in which knowledge itself becomes increasingly machinic, following the reductive understanding that technologies have command over linear time and the future. Henrot extends this tension through images of wildlife rehabilitation centres, medical technologies, laboratory procedures, and the examination of animals, drawing connections between scientific advancement, systems of observation, and the ordering impulses of taxonomy and display. As in much of Henrot’s practice, montage becomes a method for revealing hidden relationships between care and control, intimacy and abstraction, vulnerability and systems of knowledge production. The formal rhythms she deploys counter the technological insistence on chrono-normative time, suggesting instead that care is non-linear, processual, repetitious and regenerative.

Animals occupy a particularly charged role within the film. So central to childhood imagination and early learning, they appear simultaneously as symbols of wonder and as lives increasingly threatened by ecological destruction. The work lingers within this contradiction, asking what it means to inherit a world saturated with images of animal life while confronting the ongoing disappearance of the creatures themselves and their habitats. Through its cyclical structure and layered editing, In the Veins proposes care not as sentimentality, but as an ethical act of persistence within conditions of irreversible change.