PLANTED IN 2020

A film by Santiago Bessai

Directed by

Santiago Bessai

Language

English

Produced by

Santiago Bessai

18 min, documentary, Canada, 2020

Despite a workforce in quarantine, Canada planted almost 700 million trees in 2020 – the most ever. With future forests under threat, a young woman journies into the Canadian bush to endure a grueling and unconventional season of tree planting during a pandemic. 

Synopsis

This film follows a young woman into the Canadian wild, through forests desolated sites by wildfires and logging. Here she endures a grueling and unusual campaign of tree planting. Living in a nomadic camp during the pandemic and working tirelessly to plant thousands of seedlings per day, she divuldges the physical and spiritual challenges of being on the ecological frontier of the timber industry.

 

Credits 

Cinematography : Santiago Bessai

Editing : Santiago Bessai

Sound design : Santiago Bessai

Sound mix : Santiago Bessai

Music : Austin Graff, Lucas Bessai

Colourist : Patrick Maynard

With : Chloë Fratani

Santiago Bessai

Santiago Bessai is a Canadian filmmaker and documentarian. Hailing from Toronto and Montreal, he travelled to the UK to study Ethnographic and Documentary film at University College London. Seeking to explore personal effects of the industrial world, his latest work returns to Canada into the remote, desolated sites of the logging industry, documenting the work of treeplanters.

 

Filmography

FALL AWAKE, 2021, short fiction

THE HIGH ROAD, 2020, 5 min, short documentary

SUPERFOOD, 2019, 6 min, short film

PAY TO PLAY, 5 min, short documentary

HEIR, 2018, 17 min, short fiction