If you’ve ever wondered whether or not plants have feelings, then take a look at Light Needs, world-premiering at CPH:DOX and offering sublime insight into the secret life of plants, those who care for them and the special relationship they share. It is a film packed with love, humour and a sensuous attention to detail.
Light Needs feels as organic as the subjects it illuminates. From a fertile bed of strong sound design and meticulous lighting/ camerawork, the film blossoms and flowers with exquisite images that are carefully composed and framed, and filmed both thoughtfully and imaginatively. The whole thing is nourished by delicate sound and music, and soft, artistic montages of light and colour that depict such processes as photosynthesis.
The fruits of the film are its philosophical reflections between stories, sprouting and emerging like shoots on a trunk. These reflections deal with the plants’ very essence, their properties and sensitivities, and how they relate to humans and the wider world around them.
We are introduced organically to a number of green-fingered characters, humans who share an affinity bordering on obsession with plants. For them there is no doubt that plants have feelings and can literally grow to great heights with a precise combination of light, love, water and constant attention.
These folk talk seriously and with tenderness about their leafy charges, how they sometimes struggle to find the right location or approach, what they get in return for their care, how plants inspire and comfort them, how they instil a sense of peace and even a purpose in life.
The camera meanwhile captures the radiant green of those subjects of affection, the glossy, sensual leaves, the stems bursting with life juices, the tawny bark of decades-old bonsai trees, almost obscenely coloured flowers. And it captures the relationship between the carer and the cared for: hands lovingly caressing leaves, or gently wiping them with a cloth; fingers that check the earth for the right humidity; pots that are carefully moved to an even better spot in the sun.
We are taken into a rich and lush world where it is completely natural for plants to converse about humans, those weird creatures with their obsessive need for categorization and hierarchy. It is an ecosphere in which the plants expound on these differences and express their longing for a real rain shower or the wind between their leaves.
Jesse MacLean conceived, produced, directed, filmed and edited this green jewel of a film that reveals his deep love both for fallible humans and the imperturbable plants, the delicately woven interdependence between these two life forms and their need for symbiosis.
It is a testament to plants and to people who are able to connect to them.
United States / 2023 / 72 mins
Directed, written and produced by Jesse McLean
Director of Photography: Jesse McLean
Additional Camera: Mike Gibisser
Editor: Jesse McLean
Sound Design: Jesse McLean, Alex Inglizian
Original Score: Jeremy Edler, Thaddeus Kellstadt, Jesse McLean
Music Supervisor: Jesse McLean
Sales: Syndicado World Sales
