There are some verses by Bertolt Brecht, from his poem To Those Born Later (An die Nachgeborenen), written amidst the dark times of 1939, that are quoted more and more often these days:

What kind of times are these when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

For those born many decades later, Brecht’s rhetorical question still rings true, but with a major caveat — now we are all too aware that many horrors are happening to trees as well, and what strikes them makes our own plight so much the worse. In a 1995 poem, Adrienne Rich already responded to the question:

... in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

We need to talk about trees to remind ourselves how much we need them. We need to remember how we, too, are part of this vast web of interactions and entanglements called life. How every organism, including the human body, is shaped by, and in turn shapes, its environment. And that human independence is a political myth, not a biological reality.

The hidden lives of trees, weeds, plants, and flowers, and their entanglements with our own lives, run like a green thread throughout this year’s festival program. It’s the tentative main theme of Still There Are Seeds to Be Gathered, a series of films that seek to understand and respond to multi-species entanglements and inspire ecopolitics rooted in care, respect and reciprocity.

This program is inspired by the work of Derek Jarman, who created a magnificent garden that was as much a metaphor for memory and hope as it was an interplay of soil and plants — all amid an apparently inhospitable wasteland, across which a nuclear power station casts its long shadow. Yet Jarman and the land’s devastated nature, the dry skin of Earth, cared for one another.

The work of Derek Jarman, but also that of Fukuda Katsuhiko, Sammy Baloji and many other artists and filmmakers present in this festival edition, reminds us that we need to talk about trees. Not in the least because of what they can teach us about resilience and perseverance in the face of constant threat. Or, as we are told in one of the films in the program:

“We are the saviours of the world
The myth makers
The climate workers
And we bear witness
To the destruction around us
And to the stubborn hopes of men.”

Cover image: Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré - 7 promenades avec Mark Brown / Fukuda Katsuhiko - A Grasscutter’s Tale (Photograph by Hatano Yukie) / Elke Marhöfer - Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass)