Victor Kossakovsky, the director behind 'Gunda' and 'Architecton,' has brought a new nonfiction feature, 'Holy Wood Dust,' to the Venice Film Festival, where it is screening out of competition. The film turns its lens on trees, primarily those growing around the Dolomites in Northern Italy, before widening its scope to include trees cultivated on an industrial scale for the Christmas season, particularly in Germany.
Cinematographer Gianmarco Donaggio's drone photography supplies much of the film's visual punch, continuing the sumptuous style associated with Kossakovsky's work. A recurring presence throughout is botanist Stefano Mancuso, who serves as a key collaborator and is seen delivering informal lessons on trees to a group of Italian schoolchildren. Mancuso argues that plants are 'the most precious materials in the universe' because of their rarity, contrasting them with planets made of gold and other valuable metals elsewhere in the cosmos. He also tells his young audience — and by extension the film's viewers — that trees are beings capable of thinking without a brain and of communicating with one another across great distances.
The film gives particular attention to red spruce trees, the species historically favored by Stradivarius for violin-making due to their natural resonance — a detail echoed in the soundtrack's heavy reliance on string instruments. That score blends classical music with an original composition by Adrian Berenguer, while editing comes from Kossakovsky's regular collaborator Ainara Vera.
Much of the film's back half follows loggers at work, including footage of evergreens being fed into netting machines to prepare them for transport, and a sequence tracking an enormous severed spruce crown on its journey to the Vatican to serve as the Christmas tree in St. Peter's Square — a detail that appears to inform the film's punning title. 'Holy Wood Dust' is a co-production between Be Water Film, Solaria Film, Rai Cinema, Oceanika, Allegra Films, and Doppelplusultra Filmproduktion. Its producers are Mattia Guerra, Emanuele Nespeca, Alba Sotorra, Mayca Sanz L-Higueras, and Frank Mueller.
Photo: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
