Programme 1

“Where the shortness of the journey is revealed”, sings the band Montañas of the millenary yew of Bermiego. A tree for seeing ourselves in proportion. A tree of church and a tree of council, or in other words, of assembly, under which the people would meet to discuss common matters. An identitarian tree (and, how thrilling it is to think, there was a time when it was the trees that gave a people their identity). Elena Duque imagines for the texu (the Asturian word for yew) the surrounding forest it no longer has, diverse, with trunks of many colours, with bushes and nocturnal animals. It is night, the water glistens in the moonlight, the humans are scared, and they look for the millenary, identitarian and protective tree.

In Latvia there is still a virgin oak forest remaining, but the protagonist of Ozols does not live there. At seven hundred years old, he is part of the municipality of Sēja, appearing on its coat of arms. The film begins with him, immense, together with a handful of more discrete trees. A man with a cow walks by, highlighting the immensity of the oak tree and at the same time announcing the tone (preindustrial, on the fringes of some nineties choreographies) of the town. The fallen leaves are gold and they are stars. The trunk is so thick that it can be tracked in a panoramic shot, from left to right, and when the green mould appears we hear the waves of the sea, something poetic and exact, as most probably the rain that falls on this grove comes from the Gulf of Riga. Without trees there would be no water on earth, without their call it would not leave the sea.

If a cherry tree reaches one thousand four hundred years old, it requires, in our eyes, a deliberated origin, regal even; none of this business about the bird pooping the seed, by chance. According to its legend, the seed of the grey-flowered cherry tree was planted by an emperor. Like Laila Pakalniņa, Sumiko Haneda goes about introducing us to its human neighbours, who celebrate it and care for it because it is also an identitarian tree and, clearly, no one would prune or log or leave themselves to die. Like in Bermiego, in Gifu the dead were buried at the foot of the tree, so that it would feed on their bodies and give refuge to their souls. Like any plant, this cherry tree is a highly sophisticated expression of time in space: the constant and geometrical breaking away of its branches, the knotty bark revealing its growth, the flowers that punctually bloom in spring and go from pink to white and then to grey, the roots of two hundred younger cherry trees grafted onto its roots, to save them; a transplant that obeys the logic of a forest in the absence of a forest. Humanity has no other task than to learn what the forests have understood.