Where are we, what is happening? The documentary Lonely Oaks in the Berlinale emerging filmmakers section Perspektive German Cinema starts out by thoroughly disorienting the viewer. We seem to be in a wood, watching from the forest floor as police in riot gear frantically charge around. One grabs the camera, neglecting to switch it off, so we keep watching and listening to the chaos around us through a clear evidence bag. It takes the viewer a moment to figure out that filmmaker Steffen Meyn, a 360-degree camera installed on his bike helmet, has just plunged dozens of yards from a tree, capturing his own last moments.
Saturday, February 18. 2023
#Berlinale2023: Lonely Oaks #review
Where are we, what is happening? The documentary Lonely Oaks in the Berlinale emerging filmmakers section Perspektive German Cinema starts out by thoroughly disorienting the viewer. We seem to be in a wood, watching from the forest floor as police in riot gear frantically charge around. One grabs the camera, neglecting to switch it off, so we keep watching and listening to the chaos around us through a clear evidence bag. It takes the viewer a moment to figure out that filmmaker Steffen Meyn, a 360-degree camera installed on his bike helmet, has just plunged dozens of yards from a tree, capturing his own last moments.
The scene is set in fall 2018. The Hambach Forest near Cologne, a decade into its occupation by protesters trying to save the ancient wood from destruction, is the chaotic site of the global climate conflict. You might have seen images of "Hambi's" (as environmentalists lovingly call it) industrial devastation in Toronto photographer Ed Burtynsky's vast Anthropocene project. In the middle of violent police evictions of the protesters' forest village, 27-year-old film student Steffen Meyn has that fatal accident. Based on the footage he collected over two years, we follow the young man's path up the trees and into an activist community full of contradictions.
Meyn was an investigative journalist and promising film student at the renowned Cologne Media Arts Academy. Fabiana Fragale, Jens Mühlhoff and Kilian Kuhlendahl (who witnessed Steffen's fall) are credited as the filmmakers, but the film's tragic origin story makes for an astounding collaborative process, where the three students montage Steffen's unique material, co-creating a story and conversation with their dead friend that takes us into the heart of darkness, with a faint light at the end of the forest.
About what drove them to make the film, the trio comment that "Steffen's death was so senseless: Because after the conflict, both the politics and the occupation in Hambach Forest reverted to the status quo before the eviction. Everything was the same as before. Only Steffen was missing.” So what has changed with the film? “From the examination of this material we know today: Steffen's death was truly senseless--but his decisions to that point were not."
“Lonely Oaks" combines his material and retrospective interviews with the environmentalists—offsetting the upsetting opening with sensitive and astute appreciations of the excitable but also slightly socially awkward Steffen. The personal-political question that drives Meyn and his collaborators is how far activism needs to go and should go, oscillating between single human life and common cause. "We learn that the boundaries are fluid and that there is no right answer. New contradictions and ambivalence are found in every facet of resistance,” the filmmakers summarize their take-away. The question of what exactly happened also remains unresolved; Steffen in the urgent chaos seems to have neglected to secure himself properly, but a few final frames were also allegedly deleted before the camera was returned by police.
The film is an unusual long-term observational documentary, executed with criticality, clarity and craft and a captivating crescendo. The filmmakers do not over-identify with the activist community but use their unique outsider-insider status, guided by Steffen's professional distance and friendly curiosity and perseverance, to probe, empathize (and, yes, sympathize) with the search for a purpose and a better, juster, more equitable world.
Most of us won't have participated in a radical occupation, and Meyn's images of living, sleeping, strategizing across elaborately interconnected grassroots tree-top villages take us to the frontline of environmental and social confrontation. Day and night, Meyn collected immersive, close-up, constantly moving 360-degree images, putting us right inside of Hambi, wandering, climbing, struggling through the thicket. As a viewer, the emotional impact hits you in the face like the tree branches and you get an uncomfortably visceral idea of the threat to life and limb the protesters —the more radical occupiers as well as the thousands of demonstrating residents— exposed themselves to from riot police and private security hired by open-cast mining giant RWE (the original project title was plainly but aptly Body Climate Capital). The young activists, frank and insightful when talking about themselves and their movement, are woven into the escalating storyline of the protester-government stand-off. Their meta-ruminations on democracy, militancy (from either side), personal responsibility and second thoughts, their dreams of a sustainable world, their hopes for new society give inspiring as well as sobering input into the underlying questions Steffen set out to investigate. The protests have become life-changing for them, for better and worse, and life-ending for Meyn.
The film is multi-layered and conceptually, visually, and politically forceful, through the honest and provocative reflections of the participants as well as the unusual way this film (not the one Steffen would have made had he lived) came about. Emotionally arresting from the dramatic beginning and maintaining the haunting ominousness throughout (with perhaps a few tree shots too many), Steffen and one of the activists who trains him in climbing safety even joke about the risk of dying when you forgo the safety line— Vergiss Meyn Nicht (the original German title a word play on Steffen's name and the phrase Forget Me Not) is a film you won't easily forget.
What incredible mind and talent was lost with Steffen Meyn, who is wide awake and open, questioning everything and everyone on all sides of this story, including himself. His colleagues do him justice, moving the needle of our understanding of the complex and controversial web of political resistance to bio extinction. One example is our front-row seat to a scene where a plain-clothed "community liaison" police officer is trying to talk the militant wing of the protesters off their violent edge with seemingly reasonable arguments (he gets punched in the face in the process). The filmmakers pick up this thread later when a demonstrator reminds us that these negotiators are not sent in to actually help but to do reconnaissance and divide and conquer the non-hierarchically organized protesters. The police violence during the peaceful protests is shocking and was later condemned by the courts. Too late for Steffen Meyn.
A film about the dystopia of utopia and the utopia of dystopia, Lonely Oaks is an accomplished next-generation documentary that won't let you walk out the same way you walked in.
by Jutta Brendemühl
image: Made in Germany Filmproduktion
Meyn was an investigative journalist and promising film student at the renowned Cologne Media Arts Academy. Fabiana Fragale, Jens Mühlhoff and Kilian Kuhlendahl (who witnessed Steffen's fall) are credited as the filmmakers, but the film's tragic origin story makes for an astounding collaborative process, where the three students montage Steffen's unique material, co-creating a story and conversation with their dead friend that takes us into the heart of darkness, with a faint light at the end of the forest.
About what drove them to make the film, the trio comment that "Steffen's death was so senseless: Because after the conflict, both the politics and the occupation in Hambach Forest reverted to the status quo before the eviction. Everything was the same as before. Only Steffen was missing.” So what has changed with the film? “From the examination of this material we know today: Steffen's death was truly senseless--but his decisions to that point were not."
“Lonely Oaks" combines his material and retrospective interviews with the environmentalists—offsetting the upsetting opening with sensitive and astute appreciations of the excitable but also slightly socially awkward Steffen. The personal-political question that drives Meyn and his collaborators is how far activism needs to go and should go, oscillating between single human life and common cause. "We learn that the boundaries are fluid and that there is no right answer. New contradictions and ambivalence are found in every facet of resistance,” the filmmakers summarize their take-away. The question of what exactly happened also remains unresolved; Steffen in the urgent chaos seems to have neglected to secure himself properly, but a few final frames were also allegedly deleted before the camera was returned by police.
The film is an unusual long-term observational documentary, executed with criticality, clarity and craft and a captivating crescendo. The filmmakers do not over-identify with the activist community but use their unique outsider-insider status, guided by Steffen's professional distance and friendly curiosity and perseverance, to probe, empathize (and, yes, sympathize) with the search for a purpose and a better, juster, more equitable world.
Most of us won't have participated in a radical occupation, and Meyn's images of living, sleeping, strategizing across elaborately interconnected grassroots tree-top villages take us to the frontline of environmental and social confrontation. Day and night, Meyn collected immersive, close-up, constantly moving 360-degree images, putting us right inside of Hambi, wandering, climbing, struggling through the thicket. As a viewer, the emotional impact hits you in the face like the tree branches and you get an uncomfortably visceral idea of the threat to life and limb the protesters —the more radical occupiers as well as the thousands of demonstrating residents— exposed themselves to from riot police and private security hired by open-cast mining giant RWE (the original project title was plainly but aptly Body Climate Capital). The young activists, frank and insightful when talking about themselves and their movement, are woven into the escalating storyline of the protester-government stand-off. Their meta-ruminations on democracy, militancy (from either side), personal responsibility and second thoughts, their dreams of a sustainable world, their hopes for new society give inspiring as well as sobering input into the underlying questions Steffen set out to investigate. The protests have become life-changing for them, for better and worse, and life-ending for Meyn.
The film is multi-layered and conceptually, visually, and politically forceful, through the honest and provocative reflections of the participants as well as the unusual way this film (not the one Steffen would have made had he lived) came about. Emotionally arresting from the dramatic beginning and maintaining the haunting ominousness throughout (with perhaps a few tree shots too many), Steffen and one of the activists who trains him in climbing safety even joke about the risk of dying when you forgo the safety line— Vergiss Meyn Nicht (the original German title a word play on Steffen's name and the phrase Forget Me Not) is a film you won't easily forget.
What incredible mind and talent was lost with Steffen Meyn, who is wide awake and open, questioning everything and everyone on all sides of this story, including himself. His colleagues do him justice, moving the needle of our understanding of the complex and controversial web of political resistance to bio extinction. One example is our front-row seat to a scene where a plain-clothed "community liaison" police officer is trying to talk the militant wing of the protesters off their violent edge with seemingly reasonable arguments (he gets punched in the face in the process). The filmmakers pick up this thread later when a demonstrator reminds us that these negotiators are not sent in to actually help but to do reconnaissance and divide and conquer the non-hierarchically organized protesters. The police violence during the peaceful protests is shocking and was later condemned by the courts. Too late for Steffen Meyn.
A film about the dystopia of utopia and the utopia of dystopia, Lonely Oaks is an accomplished next-generation documentary that won't let you walk out the same way you walked in.
by Jutta Brendemühl
image: Made in Germany Filmproduktion
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