Heathrow Towel (2008)

This is a film about how infection spreads, seen from as close to it as possible. The legions of experts on infection, around the world, can elaborate until they are blue in the face about virus and bacteria and whether these can or cannot, or ought to or ought not to - be found in the air we breathe. But there is only one person who can tell us whether something is swirling about in the air right here and now. And that person is the one who knows how to capture all virus and bacteria and what one does to actually see them. And that person is Rolf Nybom, a researcher in Sweden. His worldwide patented ionizer is custom-built into a nondescript black bag. It has only one purpose and that is to capture the infection when it happens. If it happens. Together with the virologist Lennart Svensson, and a film crew with a somewhat morbid aversion to germs, we will discover a whole new world, which exists in front of our very noses, only magnified a hundred thousand times. Conventional terms like contact infection and waterborne infection are literally turned on their heads. And the bag which remains the whole time the nerve center of this virus hunt task force, reveals time and again the things we breathe in, in places we least expect.