This rather pleasant surprise was the only documentary I managed to come across at the Athens International Film Festival. Set in Sudan of today and following four elderly former filmmakers, all of whom have studied films abroad, it shows realistically, but also not without humour, the absurd conditions under which people must live in a country scourged by a dictatorship.
The four filmmakers' love of film and cinema is apparent throughout the documentary as they always talk about movies, reenact them or constantly carry a mobile with them and check the right shot for a movie that they have in mind to film. Let's not ignore the fact, also, that they have all been celebrated in their field as winners of awards in African Festivals and the like.
However, they have had the misfortune to be living in Sudan; a country whose dictatorship has forbidden filmmaking and has banned cinemas for more than thirty years. For this reason, the four men have made it their life's goal to reopen an Open Air Cinema, project a contemporary movie there and, for the first time in almost three decades, gather people of all ages in a movie theatre and allow them to have this experience together. This isn't easy in Sudan, though; such a project requires a lot of paperwork as well as inspections from the Ministry of National Security because who can know if there is an upper goal to your attempt to gather so many people together?
Naturally, Talking About Trees is not a happy documentary; it is light-hearted but it shows the opposite side of things as we know them and take them for granted in the west: going to a cinema on a Friday night could be considered a criminal action in Sudan. Of course there are so many other more important things that the four elders could be worried about (and that's what the phrase "talking about trees" means: that it is illegal to be talking about such an insignificant topic when the world is on fire) but their passion for cinema is actually their one true calling in life, and seeing cinemas being washed away, projectors being covered in years' dust and children buying movies by illegal street ventors and watching them solely on their laptops are things that wound them terribly.
Talking About Trees is a cynical and dry-humoured viewpoint on the political regime in Sudan; it also constitutes a social comment on things that can only be given value after they've been missed for long. Even though it does not shine a light at the end of the tunnel or leave us with an optimistic idea on what is to come next for the four people who have really become our friends as the closing credits roll, it does manage to prove that people's hearts will always beat for the thing they love no matter the circumstances they have to survive in. No type of government or system will ever be able to suppress your true passion however hard it may try to suppress everything else; that's the hopeful message of Talking About Trees.
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