Film review: The Hidden Life of Trees' natural wonders take root in pandemic age
Documentary adds visual magic to the mindblowing science of the hit book
Peter Wohlleben reveals the quiet wonder of trees.
The Hidden Life of Trees opens August 27 at The Rio Theatre.
WHAT KIND of film do we need right now, a year-and-a-half into a pandemic, on the tale end of a summer of forest fires ravaging the province?
Here’s an argument for The Hidden Life of Trees, a documentary that reveals the slow wonder of acorns becoming saplings, the near fibre-optic magic of mycelium, and the subtle fallout of clearcutting.
The Fast and the Furious it is not. Director Jörg Adolph embraces the longer view of time put forward by forester Peter Wohlleben—writer of the bestselling 2015 book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World. He reveals forests as a “superorganism”, a community that supports each other, senses pain, sends out warning cries, and asserts its own seasonal rhythms.
Drone shots slowly scan treetops ablaze with the colours of autumn, encrusted in frost, and scarred by ravenous pine beetles. In some of the most meditative segments, time-lapse photography captures roots reaching like fingers toward water sources and mushrooms popping up through moss. Franziska Henke’s score adds to the hypnotic feel of these unnarrated sequences.
But the other draw is our unlikely leading man Wohlleben, an unabashed tree nerd. His curiosity and reverence is infectious as he roams forests at home in Germany and abroad. Some in the scientific community have criticized the quaint way he anthropomorphizes trees in his book, but he’s refreshingly pragmatic here.
We follow him as he visits a scraggly 10,000-year-old Swedish spruce, digs into the moss of a forest floor, and leads delighted schoolchildren through a stand. You can feel his awe entering BC’s Phillips Arm watershed—and later, his frustration at the industrial-scale logging there, as he makes a quietly impassioned plea for selective harvesting. His argument: slow it down and let the forest regrow at its own pace for the sake of future generations. (It’s fun to watch his reserve play off the spikier David Suzuki when they appear onstage together in Victoria.)
The film ends up as a perfect companion to the book, at a time when the world is awakening to climate disaster and reassessing its self-defeating push for more, faster. In his unaffected way, Wohlleben will inspire you to listen to what the trees are saying on your next walk in the woods.
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