(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
What really separates trees from people? Obviously, trees can't move as much as we do. But they can dance in the wind! Trees also do not have hands and feet, but they have branches and roots in abundance. They don't have lungs either, but they can still breathe, and their presence is a prerequisite for us to be able to breathe. Trees don't have ears, but they can hear and have many more senses than us humans. Perhaps they exceed our intelligence? Just that we are not smart enough to understand how?
We cannot live without forests.
I often think that trees are quite similar to us humans. But even if they hadn't been, they would have as much right to life as we do. We share the soil with the trees. And without forests we cannot live. Trees are so important. But trees have no voice, even though they communicate at a very advanced level. Nevertheless, and fortunately, more and more people are hearing the trees' desperate cries for help. More and more people are becoming aware of how the forests are cut down and disappear. Books about trees are crowded in bookshops, fallen roots are taken into the galleries to an even greater extent than before, large and small theater projects are created and films and seminars about trees are produced. We hug trees, we talk to trees, we discuss trees, but no matter what we do – the forests are cut down. Most people don't see the forest for the trees. Only when the forest is gone will we truly see the trees. Realize how important they are, and then it will probably be too late. Our livelihood will be destroyed.
Beautiful, almost mythological landscape
What do you do if you realize this? That the basis of life is about to disappear. What do you do with that sadness, with the love for what is sprouting and growing? Maybe you will become a forest activist? Or making a documentary film about forest activists? As director Virpi Suutari has done with the film Once upon a Time in a Forest.
They inspire, research, map, note, look for red-listed species.
In Finland, 90 percent of the forest is commercialized. That number must be drastically reduced if species diversity is to be safeguarded. Preserving forests is the most important thing we can do to provide habitats and food for animals and species that are threatened with extinction. More forests must be protected. That is the goal of some young forest activists in Finland. Virpi Suutari, together with the photographers Teemu Liakka Jani Kumpalainen, has created a low-key, intense and cinematically magnificent film about some wise and courageous activists. It is about forests, about generational conflicts, raw capitalism, the plundering of nature, but also about friendship, courage and intense nature experiences.
In one of the first scenes in the film, we are gently led into a flooded birch forest. Is it a river that has overflowed its banks? The white and black trunks are reflected in the water. The foliage appears bright green and new. An incredibly beautiful, approaching mythological landscape. Adventurous. Up the river a small boat comes dove with some young people in it. On the way into the unknown. The faces are open as they contemplate the nature around them. One of the young people sings: Goodbye meat tit, good-bye larder – and thoughtfully adds in a pause that this may be a suitable song for the future. There is so much we have to say goodbye to.
One of the main characters, Ida, swims in the water where the tribes are reflected. The water, it turns out, follows us throughout the film as a symbol. Forest and water. Prerequisites for life. Cleansing. Healing. Life-giving. Here at the beginning of the adventure, she swims sanely, like an animal in harmony with nature. Slow swims, before we are taken out of this forest and into another. There we meet Ida again, together with a small group of people. They inspire, research, map, note, look for red-listed species, in order to find arguments for protecting this particular forest area. Once again, an exquisite photo that takes us into small close-ups of strylav and old man's beard, bark and cuckoos. We see what the young people see. Rejoice with them over the magical and the sensual. Then the intensity is increased somewhat. We are gently taken into the evening in front of the fire and hear deep existential conversations about grief and anger and not least about a deep love for nature. Ida who says: I hesitate to use the word evil, but how else should one describe what is happening?
Blocks construction roads
Further dramaturgical increase. It goes both spring, summer and autumn. Careful and clear direction. Fly on the wall mixed with staged visual and sensual and poetic sequences. We follow the small group of adventurers; soon they are fighting monsters.
Enormous tree fellers tear up large trees as if they were toothpicks.
In collaboration with Extinction Rebellion, they demonstrate in front of the Finnish forest industry, stopping large machines. Almost physically painful scenes where huge felling machines tear up large trees as if they were toothpicks. It will be winter. Ida takes an ice bath, once again with sensible swimming skills, in a river surrounded by heavy white trees. Beautiful winter. And our knights do not give up. Because even though it looks untouched in the white snow, scary things happen in the forest. The young people block construction roads into the logging fields. The photographer captures an iconic scene where Ida and a fellow soldier are skiing in a pitch-dark forest where a worker is making life hell with his big machine. A luminous dragon in the dark night. Knight Kato's world. But Ida stands before the beast, even though she is afraid. She speaks kindly to the driver when he finally spots them and gets the engine turned off. He gives up. But the industry is not giving up. The state, which owns this area, is not giving up. Of course not.
They receive sky-high fines, just as the practice has also become in Norway.
The young people won't win that battle, the police will come in the end. They lose most of the matches, they receive sky-high fines, just as the practice has also become in Norway, where activists are to be intimidated from demonstrating. Those who want to take care of nature are also imprisoned in the country, even though we have a constitution here, section 112, which states, among other things, that "everyone has the right to a nature where the productive capacity and diversity must be preserved".
But at the end of the film, Ida wins a battle. The forest she mapped at the beginning of the film has been approved as a protected area.
