Hamptons Doc Fest, in partnership with the Southampton Arts Center, will celebrate Earth Day Week with its annual Docs Equinox festival, three days of films, receptions, interviews, and Earth-related information hubs, starting Friday at the arts center. This year’s theme is “Deep Roots: Our Connection to Trees, Woodlands, Forests.”
“We chose this theme,” said Jacqui Lofaro, Hamptons Doc Fest’s founder and executive director, “because trees have been around nearly 400 million years, enough time to accumulate some serious wisdom. So let’s celebrate them, and remember that you can’t plant a tree without thinking of the future.”
Friday, which is Arbor Day, will begin with a food and wine reception and an information hub composed of tree-related environmental groups, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. William Bryant Logan, an arborist on the faculty of the New York Botanical Garden, founder and president of Urban Arborists, Inc., and the author of several books, will deliver the keynote address after the reception.
His talk will be followed at 7:30 by “Giants Rising: The Secrets and Superpowers of the Redwoods” (2024), whose director, Lisa Landers, will take questions via Zoom after the screening. The film has played at many festivals, winning prizes at the Arizona International Film Festival, the Maui Film Festival, and the Nevada Women’s Film Festival, among others.
Some 95 percent of this country’s primeval redwoods have been logged since the 1800s. The film includes interviews with people dedicated to unraveling their mysteries and protecting their future. They include a scientific detective exploring the secrets of redwood resilience; members of California’s Yurok Tribe, who are fighting to restore their cultural connections to the forests; a park manager summoning new life from ravaged timberlands, and a photographer attempting to display a life-size photograph of a 310-foot redwood.
For more than two decades, Ms. Landers has been creating award-winning content for television networks and museums such as National Geographic, the Smithsonian Channel, PBS/KQED, the American Museum of Natural History, and Mexico City’s Papalote Museo del Nino.
The film is narrated by Michael Franti, a globally recognized musician, activist, and award-winning filmmaker.
Saturday will see another food and wine reception and information hub from 5:30 to 7, when “Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees” (2016), directed by Jeff McKay, will be shown.
“Call of the Forest” features Diana Beresford-Kroeger, an Irish botanist, medical biochemist, polymath, and writer who lives near Ottawa and is known for her ability to make the scientific complexities of nature intelligible to the general public.
In the film she explores “the most beautiful forests in the Northern Hemisphere,” according to the filmmakers, including the sacred sugi and cedar forests of Japan and the massive boreal forest of Canada, which extends from the Yukon-Alaska border to Newfoundland and Labrador.
Among the experts in reforestation she encounters are Akira Miyawaki, a specialist in reforesting degraded land, who shows how a native forest system can be planted even at the smallest street corner of Tokyo. Bill Libby, a pioneer in the field of forest tree genetics, discusses the impacts of climate change on California’s redwood and giant sequoia forests.
Also featured are the Anishinaabe, an Indigenous people working to have a large tract of boreal forest in Canada recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Andrew St. Ledger, who dedicated his life to restoring the native woodlands in Ireland.
Mr. McKay is a director, cinematographer, and editor who first “encountered” Ms. Beresford-Kroeger when he heard a radio interview with her. “I had never heard anyone talk about trees the way she did,” he has said.
A coffee and scone reception will kick things off on Sunday morning at 11. Tucker Marder, founder of the Folly Tree Arboretum in Springs, will give the keynote address at 11:30, talking about the many unique trees in his outdoor nature museum.
“Fungi: Web of Life” (2023), a 41-minute film directed by Joseph Nizeti, will be shown at noon. The film has been selected for screening at 10 international film festivals, including the San Pedro International festival, where it won the best eco-documentary award.
The film features Merlin Sheldrake, an acclaimed British biologist, on his quest to find a precious blue mushroom, against the backdrop of Tasmania’s ancient Tarkine rain forest.
Cath Clarke, writing in The Guardian, said, “The film is on a mission to change the way we look at fungi — and the world . . . The script is full of cool wrap-your-brain-around-them facts, which makes it great for nature-loving kids. It sparked enough mycological curiosity for me to reach for the unread copy of [Mr. Sheldrake’s] ‘Entangled Life’ on the bookshelf.”
Mr. Nizeti is an award-winning writer, director, composer, and music producer based in Australia.
Earth Central Hub participants with information tables on Friday and Saturday include the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, the Central Pine Barrens Commission, and Canio’s Books, selling books by the authors involved in the films and other books related to the Docs Equinox theme.
Tickets each day are $20; $15 for SAC members, $10 for students and children. Also available is a three-day pass for $50, $40 for SAC members.
