This week I watched another short, 18-minute-long documentary. This one is called Once Upon a Forest: A Twig Poet’s Rewilding Journey and is build up of interviews with the Swedish artist Maria Westerberg who writes poetry, builds twig sculptures, and works on rewilding a forest.


Her grandfather started to use his land to plant spruce trees for timber. Decades later a side effect of the climate crisis strikes her beloved forest in the form of bark beetles, who kill the spruce trees. The monoculture makes this kind of infestation so dangerous. A natural forest that has more than one species has much more resilience towards such infestations because a beetle like this doesn't attack all kinds of trees, so even if one species gets hit badly, there are others that will take over. She had been dealing with climate anxiety and started to plant leaf trees to replace the spruce, and by doing that, she helped herself come to terms with the ecological crisis and help the forest at the same time.

I had never heard of this artist before, but I'm really glad I came across this film because she is interesting, and the film, which is by Mattias Olsson of Campfire Stories, is beautiful. That is the best way I can describe it. It's beautifully shot and has a very good story to tell. It is about dealing with climate anxiety, it's about living on your own terms, and it is about nature, all in the short time of 18 minutes. And it is not just that. Maria has all these notebooks that are marked Facebook. When she is asked about this, she says Facebook is about diary entries, and photos, and that is what she has in her notebooks. Also, people kept asking her if she was on Facebook, and now she can say, Yes, I am, without having given her data to a big corporation. I liked that idea. In short, I liked this film and can recommend it.

It can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5ozG...