Director Victor Kossakovsky has developed a reputation for making us reevaluate how we think about human and more-than-human life. His emotional and tender Gunda (2020), about a pig and her piglets, was the first film in his “empathy trilogy.” Last year, his Trillion, a wordless documentary following an artist returning fish scales to the ocean in Norway, was a reference to the estimated number of fish taken from the world’s oceans by humans every year.
At the Venice Film Festival, Kossakovsky will world premiere, in a Venice Open – Out of Competition slot on Sept. 6, his new film, Holy Wood Dust, a cinematic invitation into the life and world of trees in collaboration with Italian botanist and author Stefano Mancuso – and an invitation to change our perspective.
“While art may be powerless to halt the conflicts unfolding around us and cannot stop the bullets of today, I believe that telling stories rooted in empathy can plant the seeds for a more peaceful future,” the Russian-born Kossakovsky says in a director’s statement on the Venice website.
“What happens to a stump the second after a tree is cut down? What does that tree think and feel at that very moment?” a synopsis for the film asks. “Holy Wood Dust is an invitation to radically reimagine the plant kingdom from a new, groundbreaking perspective.”
