With their agile little hands, raccoons have become the urban bandits we love and hate. In the past 70 years, their population has exploded in North American cities, and interaction with humans is making them smarter — maybe even pushing them down a new evolutionary path.

Using high-definition, infrared cameras that turn pitch dark into daylight, The Nature of Things achieves something that has never been done before: it intimately follows a family of urban raccoons over the course of six months. Under the watchful eye of their mother, the young grow, develop and learn to navigate the raccoon capital of the world, Toronto.