Auroville's monthly news magazine since 1988

EVER SLOW GREEN – a film about Auroville’s unique re-afforestation work

 

Nothing happens fast in a forest. The forest is a being with its own rhythms, and those rhythms are slow. The people who work in forests – not the commercial, rip-out loggers but the real foresters – are permeated by these rhythms which are longer and larger than those of a fleeting mind. Foresters tend to speak little, and when they do it is brief and to the point. They grow but seem to grow inward, toward their core, so that when you meet them you feel you are returning to something like bedrock. 

All this and more is beautifully captured in Aurovilian Christoph Pohl’s film, Ever Slow Green, which was recently screened at the 6th edition of the Auroville Film Festival and which won the ‘Wisdom Award’ in the category of ‘Films made by Aurovilians, bioregion residents or guests of Auroville’. 

The film presents itself as the story of re-afforestation in Auroville. We learn about the beginnings, the mistakes, the learnings and present threats to the work. Most of this has been done before in video and pamphlets. What makes this film different is the way the topic is presented, because this is not so much a film about forests as a film that seeks to evoke the forest experience. 

This is done primarily through slow motion which allows the deeper rhythms of the forest to sink in. As a forest is a whole yet made up of innumerable details and small stories, so the gaze shifts languidly from the vast canopy surrounding the Matrimandir to the detail of a spider’s web or a vine snake catching a bird.  

In this film, people are subordinate to the forest. Nobody speaks directly to the camera, nothing is allowed to disturb the focus upon trees, shrubs, lianas, insects.  Yet there is clearly another story here, and that is about the people who care for it.  It’s about what they do, and why they do it. Above all, perhaps, although this is only hinted at, it is about what they have become or, rather, what the forest has made of them.   

For here we touch upon an interesting example of symbiosis. Forests, particularly in the arid conditions of the tropics, don’t spontaneously create or recreate themselves.  Particularly in the early stages, they need a helping hand from humans. But once a forest begins to take off, to acquire its own being and presence, it begins to shape those who live there and care for it. 

Take, for example, the Auroville Forest group as presented in this film. Here is a group which has no hierarchy, is very diverse and which has no laid-down afforestation policy (“every individual stewards the land in the way they see best”), yet everybody contributes in their own way to the re-creation of a Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest. This process, which one forester described in this film as  being “as close as you can get to divine anarchy in Auroville”, is not dissimilar to the decentralized way in which everything in a forest – trees, shrubs, fauna, fungi, microbes – contributes to the maintenance and flourishing of the whole. 

In other words, we are presented with a world where there is no separation; where humanity and wilderness nourish, influence, intertwine with each other rather than being in conflict. Where foresters mirror the silence and deep-rootedness of the forest, even taking on, as they age, the gnarled look of the great trees they care about so passionately.

This is a fine, sensitive film. It is hoped it will be made available for general viewing soon.