Canadian documentarian Jennifer Baichwal has followed up the international success of her acclaimed feature, Manufactured Landscapes, with this dense and mysterious non-fiction film on people who have literally been struck by lightning. Act Of God begins and ends with the legendary New York writer Paul Auster, who bookends an investigation into the nature of chance and the chances of nature. Also on board is the British guitarist and composer Fred Frith, and a gaggle of lightning survivors who reconstruct their own—often fatal—encounters with natural electricity. And, like Manufactured Landscapes, Act Of God is plush with extraordinary images, pictures that reveal the fierce and fleeting beauty of lightning, caught by both professionals and amateurs.