Earth Day: Sharna Pax Film Screening

Denmark/Mexico, 2018, 16 mm/stereo, colour and b&w, 23 min.

Word for Forest is a cinematic journey that travels from the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen to Santiago Comaltepec in the mountains of Oaxaca. The film records a seed’s displacement from Mexico, where it was collected by the botanist Frederik Liebmann in 1842, to the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen. The film returns to the plant’s original home, the unique habitat of the cloud forest. The cloud forest in this region has an exceptionally high biodiversity, where specific oaks and pines grow side by side with a rich plant life that is not found anywhere else.

In Santiago Comaltepec, a community belonging to the forest, has not always had the right to care of the land. Both the Spanish colonial empire and the Mexican state have previously demanded control over the forest. In the 1980s, the community fought for the forest’s rights. Through ‘comunalidad’, the forest became common land and only the naturally fallen wood can be collected. The film follows the voice of the forest guide Don Felipe, as he talks about the forest in both the local language Chinantec and Spanish. It invites one to listen to the rhythms of the language and the sounds of the forest and to absorb the variations in the many ferns. It beckons the view to enter a universe that might show an alternative to the path of destruction that we are currently on.

Pia Rönicke is an artist based in Copenhagen. In recent years, she has been investigating different botanical collections that show traces of colonial and geopolitical conditions. Her work is concerned with problems of space and spatial transformations. She is interested in the connection between work space and filmic space, and how we conceive historical matters in relationship to our daily activities. Rönicke often works with archives and the practice of collecting is a recurring theme in her artworks. Her artistic practice spans film, prints, sculptures, and objects, which together build narratives.

West Germany, 1969, 16mm, colour, 28 min.

A critical look at the political and cultural history of the Danube country and its development; a travelogue. Travelling the Danube by steamboat, Die Donau Rauf unearths layered narratives of the ancient and the recent past creating a poetic document of filmed archaeology.

Peter Nestler was born in Breisgau, Germany in 1937. His films initially recorded the changes affecting rural and industrial communities in the early 1960s. Since then, he has developed a politically and aesthetically uncompromising body of work in which history, the working class, labor and production, immigration, the environment, and the struggle against fascism have been recurring themes. 

Zsóka Nestler was born in Budapest in 1944. Betweeen 1967 and 1978 she worked with Peter on 24 documentaries on 16mm, mostly as a team of two. Peter ran the camera and Zsóka recorded the sound. Later she studied and worked in the cities of Stockholm and Uppsala (receiving a Bachelors Degree in Behavioral Research/Cross-cultural Relations and Immigrant Issues, and a Graduate Diploma in Psychotherapy). She has contributed to many research projects and publications on immigration and refugees, racism and ethnic conflicts and has worked in governmental institutions and NGOs. She returned to making films with Peter in 1992 on 'Zeit' and in 2003 on 'Mit der Musik groß werden'.