A Voice Once Heard

Through this film, I intended to craft an experiential way of understanding the relatively recent discovery of how the trees in a forest are able to communicate with one another through mycorrhizal fungi within the soil. Rather than communicating these concepts through traditional documentary approaches I instead opted to convey them through a more poetic, sensory-driven form of filmmaking, where the aesthetic elements of the film take centre stage.

The film’s structure was in part inspired by the writings and work of Peter Wohlleben and David George Haskell, in that they propose the various ways of listening to trees and their own phenomenological interpretations of such sounds. Through the recording of various elements of the natural world interacting with the trees, like the wind, rain, or animals, distinct sounds that are individual to each tree or location begin to emerge. These recorded sounds are presented in the film as the sound recordist’s attempts at capturing the communications of the trees. As the film progresses, the perspective of the sound recordist shifts into an unanthropocentric perspective, where the ineffable inner realm of the trees is presented through an aurally and visually manipulated sequence. It is common within cinema, and especially documentary film, to be centred around and be from the perspective of humans, with their surroundings being demoted to the background. However, in this film, I aimed to break free from this limitation and create, through the aesthetic and narrative approaches within the film, transcendental non-human perspectives that an audience is able to experience. I strived to approach the different realms of the humans and the trees as equally important and valuable, with the attention being to bring the plants and animals, that often reside in the background into the foreground.

I was fascinated by learning of the discovery of these complex mycorrhizal networks but a part of me was almost unsurprised. Looking throughout our human history through mythology and folklore it seems as though we have always known. The trees’ commanding presence in our stories and our spiritual and emotional connections to each other and our world have been felt seemingly throughout our existence. This ‘connection’ conjured up by this presence is difficult to articulate in words that don’t lose its immense importance, but I believe that one way in which it is preserved is through experience. Through cinema, perhaps more than any art form, lies this powerful possibility to craft and share these essential types of experiences and conjure up lost connections with these invisible realms within our world.