Chilean artist/filmmaker Meliza Luna Venegas’ Green Desert (screening in the International Competition at DOK Leipzig) is both a climate change movie and an intensely personal and poetic journey into the director’s own past, and that of her family.
The project is produced by Isabel Orellana Guarello through the Santiago-based company Araucaria Cine, an outfit dedicated to auteur filmmaking.
In 2019, director Venegas emailed Guarello to ask her to collaborate on the project. By then, she already had extensive images she had recorded of the forest fires in the Maule region of Chile where she grew up. She was also beginning to draw together archive material from the region.
“Meliza sent me an email. I saw the footage she sent me, and I felt she had a very unique sensibility that resonated with me as belonging to a tradition of women in arts in Chile,” the producer remembers her first communications with the filmmaker. Venegas reminded her of other Chilean artists like singer and folklorist, Violeta Parra, who used music, poetry and often visual material in their work.
“I felt she had a very unique point of view. Also, when we first met, we kind of clicked!”
The documentary includes elements of performance art. At one stage, the filmmaker’s body is covered with a huge cascade of wood chips taken from the plundered trees. This was a gruelling and dangerous scene to shoot. “I was worried because I was seeing it from the outside and you could see it was very intense for her body,” producer Guarello remembers.
In another scene, we see Venegas outside the rubble of abandoned buildings, hanging upside down next to a map of Chile.
Venegas would only do these scenes once. She describes them as being like rituals that can’t be repeated. “In the film, there is always a link between body and territory,” she explains. “I feel connected to this land. Oaks are my family. Both images represent the pain. They’re a call for awareness of the situation…we are one of the few species that destroy the eco-system in which we ourselves live.”
As the film reveals, the old forests have been destroyed by both big business and forest fires. Local farmers are encouraged by the government to plant pines to replace the trees that have been lost – but, as we are told, these are “the same pines that caused the drought and erosion that brought the fires.”
A generation ago, the Pinochet dictatorship promoted and expanded the pine industry – and even smallholders were encouraged to plant pines.
The filmmaker comes from “a humble family.” Her ancestors have been based “forever” in the forest region and used to “live from the land.” That has now become impossible. The wine-making and food production has all but stopped. And as the old way of life changes, there has inevitably been a big migration to the cities.
In the period from 2015 to 2017, huge forest fires caused further devastation for the families living in the region.
Throughout her life, Venegas, who is now 35 years old, has witnessed the destruction of the old land and ecosystem at first hand.
“It came to a point when, after there was a severe drought in this area, there were only a few small islands of native forests left. And this is when the forest fires started, finally destroying the last forests remaining. In 2015, we shot the first images of this film, which is the black remains of the burned forest.”
In the documentary, Venegas is trying to evoke the memory of the forest through stories of the women in her family. By chance, while going with her mother to visit an old aunt who was looking to dismantle and sell an old house, Venegas came across an old family guitar, a ‘viheula.’ She felt an immediate connection with the instrument which, she found out, used to belong to her great-great grandmother and was passed down the generations. Her grandmother was a singer, not a guitar player, and so the tradition of playing was halted.
Nobody had told Venegas about this side of the family history. She was fascinated to discover that her great-great-grandfather wouldn’t allow his wife to play the guitar in public. This was a very patriarchal family and women were not allowed to draw attention to themselves. However, the director learned that after the great-great grandfather’s death, his wife played the guitar at his funeral. She regards this as much as a sign of defiance and of liberation as of grief.
“It was very important for me to find this old guitar because it had these invisible connections attached to it, of the history of the women in my family,” the director says. She adds that she sees Green Desert as a “story crossed by magic” and regards her own “need to create art” as following in a family tradition stretching back many generations.
The documentary complements work which Venegas showed recently at the Santiago Arts Media Biennale – videos and photographs also addressing the catastrophic consequences of the logging and forest fires in the Maule region. There are also images showing her attempts to regenerate the land. Late in the film, we see some “small oases” where the original vegetation has survived. “Throughout the ten years of making this film, we have been collecting these small flowers, or tress…whatever is left of this forest.”
The film itself is full of archive material and of footage shot on different film formats, including 8m and 16mm. There is haunting, surrealist-like imagery of her uncle on horseback dragging a wooded cross behind him across the scorched earth.
Footage was drawn from such older films such as El Maule (1983) directed by Juan Carlos and Patricio Bustamante; No nos trancarán el Paso by Guillermo Cahn, and the Robert Gerstmann Collection.
“For me, the film is a journey through time,” the director concludes. “A lot of the archive is used to help remember the culture of the people who lived on this land and of the forests that don’t exist anymore. The movie is a subjective journey. Memories are intertwined with things I imagine.”
Now, producer Guarello is in talks with sales agents keen to represent the film, which has also already been chosen for several festivals after DOK Leipzig.
