Director: Catherine Marciniak
A photographer and a filmmaker chase spores across Australia's wet forests, turning fungi into the main characters of a wilderness expedition.
What is Follow the Rain about?
Follow the Rain trails two obsessive naturalists, Stephen Axford and a filmmaking partner, as they track the hidden lives of mushrooms and slime moulds through humid Australian bushland after seasonal rains. Time-lapse photography reveals growth patterns invisible to the naked eye: caps unfurling in minutes, spores drifting on currents of air, threads of mycelium linking trees underground. Rather than a dry nature lecture, the film builds a loose narrative around the pair's fieldwork, moving from rainforest floor to eucalypt woodland as they search for photogenic specimens after each downpour. Along the way it sketches the broader relationships between fungi, plants, and the insects and animals that depend on them, framing decomposition and regrowth as one continuous cycle rather than separate events. The 77-minute runtime keeps the pacing brisk, favoring visual discovery over voice-over exposition, and treats the forest itself as a character reacting to weather in real time.
Cast & crew
The film centers on photographer Stephen Axford, whose macro imagery anchors the visual style, working alongside director and cinematographer Catherine Marciniak, who shapes the expedition into a coherent travelogue.
Context & significance
Released in 2024, Follow the Rain sits within a wave of specialist nature documentaries that use macro and time-lapse techniques to make overlooked organisms visually gripping, following in the tradition of fungi-focused filmmaking that gained wider attention through similar wildlife projects earlier in the decade. Its Australian setting gives it a distinct ecological focus, spotlighting native forest systems rather than the more commonly filmed rainforests of South America or Southeast Asia.
Where & how to watch
Follow the Rain streams on K-Time with Persian subtitles, and the film's page is free to browse without an account. Watching the documentary itself requires logging into a K-Time account, which also unlocks the platform's Farsi-language interface and recommendations built for Persian-speaking viewers.