Documentary filmmaker Mark Lewis joins us for a Double Feature of CANE TOADS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY and ANIMALICIOUS, followed by a Live Q&A.

CANE TOADS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY (1988): Mark Lewis takes the nature documentary into new realms of the humorous, surreal, and downright bizarre with this stranger-than-fiction tale of the ultimate environmental self-own. The cane toad—Bufo marinus, a species native to Central America—was imported by the sack-load to Australia in 1935 in an attempt to rid the country of the greyback beetle, which was rapidly destroying the sugarcane crop. The toads adapted beautifully to their new surroundings. Problem was, the beetle could fly and they couldn’t. What the cane toad is unusually proficient at, however, is making more cane toads—thousands upon thousands more. CANE TOADS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY tells the wild story of this amphibious assault—warts and all.

ANIMALICIOUS (1999): A film about fate, coexistence, vanity, justice, karma, and forgiveness, ANIMALICIOUS collects six stories of people and the animals that shot them, fell on them, and generally brought mayhem of one sort or another to their lives. Filmed in Kentucky, Missouri, and England, ANIMALICIOUS features a bomb-diving duck, a squirrel that thinks it’s landed on Normandy Beach, a hawk that could easily work for a hair-growth pharmaceutical company, a parakeet, a turkey, a hungry snake, and one tiny dog. With his typically wry humor, director Mark Lewis uncovers the comic and quizzical relationships that exist between people and creatures great and small.