Far from the trees

Once upon a time there was a holm oak as grand as a forest; next to it, the other trees seemed like grass. They had decorated it with ribbons and wreaths, and the nymphs often danced around it, hand-in-hand. The king of that country ordered that it be chopped down for he wanted the timber to build a palace. No one obeyed him, so he took the axe himself and the holm oak howled from the blow of the iron. Everyone was astonished; a servant who tried to stop him was decapitated by the king. From the tree, grown pale, blood flowed. It finally fell. Then Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, the “bearer of the seasons”, commanded Hunger to nestle itself in the guts of the king. Hunger obeyed and the king sent for that which is bred in the sea, on the land and in the air, he demanded food from food. Supplies that would have fed entire towns and cities were not enough for him, and the more he guzzled, the hungrier he was. He ate his fortune. He ate his father’s fortune. He sold his daughter. Nothing sated him, nothing, and ‘he started to bite off his own extremities, feeding his body, the poor fool, by tearing it to pieces’. The poor fool could have been called Capitalism.

This film program stares into the abyss that now separates us from the trees. It considers the production of essential goods over the length (and width) of time and, consequently, pays tribute to original unproductivity, non-industrial modes of production, subsistence economies, and animals. It pays tribute to some humans too, all artists of their trade. Why? For love of our world, in defence of our world, to stoke the desire (or imagination) needed to defend it, so that the Samoan islands or the Orinoco delta do not vanish beneath the waters, so that Sicily or the Traslasierra valley do not vanish beneath the flames. Even though they will vanish. And because, as a poster found on the lower riverbank of the Ebro at the beginning of the seventies proclaimed: ‘They call development a miracle, but the work of a miracle is distribution’.

Programme and texts by Miriam Martín. Translation into English by Mattea Cussel