Il était une Forêt

I encountered the forest with Francis Hallé in Guyana. I carried with me the usual preconceptions: animals, diseases... Yet I immediately felt an immense sense of well-being, I felt like I was breathing the purest air in the world. An extraordinary universe, animals everywhere, colossal trees; I watched how Francis touched them, drew them, spoke to them... He went far in understanding the plant world, and that's what drove me to make a documentary about it, even though I knew it would be a huge challenge: to recount, through the medium most devoted to action, the seemingly static life of a forest. From my first meeting with Hallé, the difficulty of the undertaking was clear to me. A forest is the most anti-cinematic thing there is: it has a vertical dimension (while cinema has a horizontal development) and, to our eyes, it is almost immobile because it lives in a dilated time, made up of centuries, impossible to adapt to the 24 frames per second of a film. This is why, alongside the traditionally filmed images, I decided to introduce digital animations that would allow me to illustrate processes normally invisible to the human eye, such as the birth of a bud, the branching of a young tree, or the dance of perfume molecules during flowering.