Underground Networks
fungi form a mutual relationship with the roots of most plants. In the main plants seem to gain, break even or lose little on the deal. As more is learned about these networks it is becoming clear that they are highly complex and influential, perhaps having a big say on which plants thrive and which fail.                                               Nature, International Weekly Journal of Science                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Hidden in the shadows, intertwined with virtually everything on the planet, mushrooms and fungus are an incredible dynamic force – they stink, ooze, metabolize, synthesize and decompose their way down a path of inebriation, murder and mayhem. 

http://www.deepbluefunkfilms.com/mushroomtreat.html

This film will be the first full-length documentary about the role and scope of fungus in our lives and environment; exploring a vast, untapped, and forgotten kingdom. Fungi are a branch of life as diverse and important as either the plant or animal kingdom, and yet people know very little about them. Hundreds of millions of years older than plant life and sharing a closer genetic make-up with animals, the fungi remain a mystery.

Underworld: The Fun, Violent, Sexy Mushroom Movie will challenge its viewers to accept some radical ideas about communication, individuality, sexuality and the nature of death. In the fungal world sexual pairings are enormously intricate, allowing as many as 21000 pairings – a concept that humans have a hard time grasping. The largest organism on the planet is a single fungus in Oregon that stretches over 2200 acres.                                                      

This film will delve into this unexplored underworld, into the lost, forgotten and maligned kingdom, exposing the underground fungal network, mycelium, as a primary force of nature. Some cultures, such as the Japanese, Siberians, and Eastern Europeans, have maintained their cultural connections to mushrooms. However, for the most part, the Western World sits in ignorance, forgetting the wealth of knowledge that exists concerning mushrooms – their medicinal and nutritional values, their significance in ecological maintenance and sustainability, their religious and spiritual uses, and their overall beauty and complexity. Ours has become a culture where we’ve been suckered into believing that there is only one kind of mushroom (because it is the only one available in the stores), that it has no nutritional value, that it is a vegetable, and that all other mushrooms are deadly and should be avoided. 

It is time to put our heads back in the ground and remember what is actually going on!