Piu Caprim, “Sad Leaves”

 

Piu Caprim, “Sad Leaves”, from Bella Caledonia on Vimeo.

 

 

Words by Raoni Metuktire, chief of the indigenous Brazilian Kayapó people. Footage from Amnesty International. A Bella Caledonia production by Steven Reynolds.

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  1. SleepingDog says:

    A long time ago, where I live in Scotland, a great many trees were cut down to build wooden warships. Now, people are left complaining that a row of just a few trees have been cut down without consulting locals, or a campaign to save a single old tree that was a landmark in a street failed when the owner of the land cut it down as he only faced a small fine from the council. Our local newspaper reports on these tiny scraps of woodland, but not the health of our remaining forests. Something has gone badly wrong here.

    The ‘sad leaves’ description reminds me of Douglas Adam’s absurd and destructive Golgafrinchan colonists who adopt the leaf as their new currency and defoliate Earth’s forests due to inflation. The tree is a symbol of life in some European cultures, and Charles Darwin’s Tree of Life stands for all life that has ever existed on the planet. This is both a literal and metaphorical battle between life and death, health and sickness, knowledge and ignorance, ethics and avarice, reason and insanity.

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