One might reasonably ask if the Emmy award–winning documentarian Irene Taylor’s new movie – an expansive investigation into how people and trees coexist – is most fundamentally a movie about people via trees, or about trees via people? For Taylor, the answer is typically unconventional – it’s actually neither; it’s a film that, as its title suggests, is about entanglements. “We are the entanglements,” she said during an interview about her film. “Characters in the film are drawn to a family tree, a garden full of trees, a forest. But the entanglements are the relationships that we have around those trees. These characters show us how trees can really drive us apart, and also bring us together.”
Trees and Other Entanglements tells the fascinating, occasionally intersecting stories of various individuals’ often strange and surprising relationships with trees. Mostly based in the Pacific north-west of the United States and Canada, the film’s central characters include George Weyerhaeuser, who transformed the family timber empire with a model of harvesting trees that has caused severe environmental damage; Ryan Neil, one of the few Americans to master the Japanese art of bonsai; Beth Moon, a photographer who has gained worldwide acclaim for her masterly large-format prints of trees; and Dirk Brinkman, a force for reforestation for over 50 years.
