With a growth rate of up to a meter/day—the world record of living plants—and structural properties that in cases equal steel’s and concrete’s, bamboo is a versatile design material. A material that provide an interesting alternative in an ongoing contemporary material/sustainability dialogue. The Bamboo Dialogues seeks to answer the questions: What is this material? and Why are we not using more of it in contemporary design, engineering and architecture? The narrative of the movie spans five continents and is told by “ bamboo whisperers”: such as engineers, artisans, students, architects, designers, historians, biologists, and farmers as well as bamboo constructions and artifacts. The material in the movie is partly a crowd sourced. Successful contemporary projects and best practices in bamboo are mostly found off the beaten track and away from trendsetting metropolises in remote and peripheral areas and locations. Therefore, The Bamboo Dialogue would not have been possible to make during the restricted travel situation around the Covid 19 pandemic without the generous joint effort by a number of: institutions, companies, and individuals from around the globe. Bamboo have had a soft voice in the contemporary material discourse. The film seeks to amplifies this soft voice and showing possibilities and challenges for this miracle plant. The Bamboo Dialogues is the second movie in a series, portraying the versatile and sustainable material—bamboo. It follows the successful documentary Bamboo—the Tradition of the Future.
