Forest Futures is a poetic and thought-provoking film that visits ancient forest ecosystems from the earth’s past, imagines future forests in the face of changing climate and shows the forest as a multi-species school, where children practice more-than-human co-existence.
Forest Futures explores the forest as a site of deep time, ecological transformation, and interspecies learning. Set in the mountainous region of South Tyrol, the film traces a journey from ancient fossilized forests that thrived over 280 million years ago through to speculative visions of future forests in a rapidly warming world. Combining scientific inquiry with imaginative storytelling, the film draws on the disciplines of paleobotany, climate science, and early childhood education to reimagine the forest as both a teacher and a protagonist.
Children from a forest kindergarten in South Tyrol become the primary narrators and protagonists in Forest Futures, moving through the seasons in an intimate kinship with the forest, living and learning in tune with the silvestral environment and helping us imagine a different future based on more-than-human co-existence. As they play, observe, and reflect, the children become living bridges between past and future—connecting the evolutionary resilience of ancient flora with the ethical imperative to care for nature today.
The film weaves together documentary footage, voice-overs, and 3D animations created from fossil scans. These animations visualize prehistoric plant life, offering glimpses of how trees adapted to previous climate shifts, and posing urgent questions about how they may respond to our present-day crisis. Rather than positioning the forest merely as a backdrop or resource, Forest Futures presents it as a dynamic, sentient space of memory, possibility, and collaboration.
Uriel Orlow’s sustained engagement with the children and the forest—filming over several seasons and working closely with scientists and educators—underpins the film’s layered narrative. The fossilized trees from a post-ice age warming period offer a valuable mirror to our current climate trajectory. Through this lens, the forest becomes a living archive of knowledge and a speculative template for future coexistence.
Forest Futures concludes with a stirring forest manifesto, voiced by the children, which urges us to shift our attention from exploitation to listening, from extraction to presence. “The forest invites us to notice, to listen, to be,” it declares—a call to reimagine human life within a larger ecological continuum, grounded in care, imagination, and mutual respect.
