The Pine Barrens
feature-length documentary
David Scott Kessler - Director, Producer, DP, Editor, VFX
Awards:
Best Documentary - New Jersey Film Festival 2020
Emerging Filmmaker - Princeton Environmental Film Festival 2017
Best Documentary - Jim Thorpe Independent Film Festival 2017
Excellence Award - Veritas Film Festival 2020
Official Selections:
Rooftop Films Summer Series 2019
Visions Du Reel Industry 2019
Awareness Festival 2020
Wildlife Conservation Film Festival 2020
Lighthouse International Film Festival 2020
New Jersey Film Festival 2020
A wilderness, sculpted by fire, stands defiant of the encroaching megalopolis surrounding it. Once deemed inhospitable, individuals made their homes here. Through a veil of folklore and myth, their sense of identity is inexorably linked to the diminishing island of darkness in a sea of traffic and lights within the most densely populated state in the nation - New Jersey.
The Pine Barrens is an epic tone-poem, where raging forest fires and crackling campfires generate rebirth of the physical ecology and the identity of the land and its inhabitants. It is a celebration of nature and a portrait of a particular place, but one that casts doubt on its know-ability, and our ability to discern reality from superstition. The Pine Barrens explores the symbiotic yet sometimes destructive relationship between man and nature. Through moments with individuals spanning several years, it reveals the influence of place on identity during a period of gradual loss of both a way of life and of the environment that gave birth to it.
Since 2012, short, evolving work-in-progress versions of The Pine Barrens have been screened with a live score by The Ruins of Friendship Orchestra making the project unfixed and semi-improvisation in nature putting emphasis on the experience and our changing relationship to place and the natural world over time.
www.pinebarrensfilm.com