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“Gorgeous.”

— Eric Kohn,


“A delicately seductive flow of scenes.”

— Neil Young,


“A charming and beautifully filmed story…Song From the Forest succeeds in being a striking and gently haunting film.”

— Mark Adams,


Song From the Forest
2013 | Germany | 96 min
ABOUT THE FILM

LONG SYNOPSIS

As a young man, U.S.-born Louis Sarno heard a song on the radio that never let him out of its grasp. He followed the mysterious sounds back to the Central African rainforest, found his music with the Bayaka pygmies—and never came back. Today, 25 years later, Louis is a full member of this community of hunters and gatherers. Louis has a son with a Bayaka woman, 13-year-old Samedi. As a baby, Samedi became seriously sick. As he lay dying, Louis held him the whole night and promised him “If you survive, one day I will show you the world from which I came.”

Now it is time to keep his promise, and so Louis travels with his son from the African rainforest to a different jungle made of concrete, glass and asphalt—to New York City, where he stays with his best friend, indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Soon after their arrival, there is a first surprise Samedi, who had never left the rainforest and does not speak a word of English is far more comfortable with the US than Louis. The rapprochement with the world that his father wanted to forget and that his son now wants to conquer is slow, quiet and not free from setbacks. Joined by the contrast between the rainforest and the urban US, the unequal couple grows ever closer on the road. SONG FROM THE FOREST narrates their victories, but also their defeats in a modern epic in which the shared journey of father and son steers towards a surprising reversal of roles and gives the viewer an intimation that the African rainforest and urban America, these apparently separated worlds, are not all that separate after all.


Writer & Director Michael Obert
Producers Alex Tondowski, Ira Tondowski
Editor Wiebke Grundler
Cinematographer Siri Klug
Sound Timo Selengia

FESTIVALS
2013: IDFA (World Premiere); 2014: SXSW, Thessaloniki

AWARDS
Best Feature-Length Documentary (IDFA)

EXHIBITION FORMATS
DCP, HDCAM, Blu-Ray, DVD


PRESS KIT

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AVAILABLE PRESS IMAGES (click to preview)
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DIALOGUE LIST

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WEBSITE

http://www.songfromtheforest.com