‘Here’, all the goodness we can learn from the oldest plant in the world

In this world buried under thousands of trivial distractions we do not pay enough attention to each other, nor do we give it to nature or the other species with which we live on the planet. The filmmaker Bas Devosoverwhelmed by the idea of ​​a dystopian future, imagines a better one through cinema, where we take care of each other, share, respect each other… He does it in Herea small miracle overflowing with kindness and empathy which won the award for best film in the Encounters section in Berlin, in which it also won the FIPRESCI prize from international critics.

Also present in the Zabaltegi section of the San Sebastian Festivalthe premise from which Devos is based is simple, but effective. A Romanian worker who works in Belgium cooks a soup with the vegetables he has in the refrigerator so that they do not rot during his vacation and distributes it among his sister, his friends and colleagues. About to leave, he meets a biologist who is preparing a doctorate on mosses, the oldest known plant species. The young woman’s capacity for attention towards the almost invisible leaves a deep mark on him.

all names

Was George Steiner the one who warned the world that “what is not named does not exist.” And she has been the biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer which has stated that “naming things is the first step to learning to look at them.” Now the Belgian filmmaker, linking to this conviction, wants to go a little further and asks a question, “if we knew the names of everything around us, like this character who wants to know the name of all the species of moss, and we learned to look at it, would the world be different?” Without a doubt, it is answered with its beautiful story, a tale that reveals the great adventure that is everyday and the connections between each other.

Starring by Stefan Gota and Liyo Gongthe film was born from Devos’ reflection on the invisibility of more than 43,000 people from Romania who work in Brusselsa huge community that existed around him and that he barely looked at. Added to this was the book by a US researcher specialized in mosses, in which he explains the role of this species in nature. “That came together in an idea, that There is something especially small that unites all living beings“.

The attention span

Here appeal to the attention span of the human being“when we have seen something, we can no longer ignore it.” Hence, Devos translates that ‘attention’ into beautiful images and a kind time, that of the daily life of a good man. The film, which celebrates human bonds in a world of cell phones and social media, reveals a wonderful truth, we are surrounded by beauty, but we don’t see it. Finding her again, maybe it would give us happiness.

“Perhaps attention is a prerequisite for love,” says Devos, who has said, in the presentation of his film at festivals, that when he began the project, he read a lot about moss, got caught up in the ecofeminist theories of the philosopher Donna Hataway and the aforementioned environmental biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer and concluded a film that “talks about soup boxes, seeds and roots and the soft moss under our feet. And, consequently, It’s a movie about what it means to be human.”

Share and gather

To all this, the filmmaker added the inspiration he found in the writer’s essay Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fictionin which she maintains that the first humans were mainly gatherers, although the image we have of them is that of a hunter wielding a spear. The reality, says this author, is that the first cultural artifact is a container, a net, a bag in which to carry all the seeds and fruits.

“But this bag and its history lost to the more heroic image of the mammoth hunter brandishing a spear. A very masculine image that supports a masculine narrative,” says the filmmaker, who adds: “Le Guin counters this proposal with a more feminine narrative. Moving away from that image to look for stories of cooperation, of sharing, of gathering. Because it is that storing and sharing that defines us as humans. “I love that image.”