Director: Otilia Portillo Padua
Writer: Sheerly Anvi, Sara Dosa, Gabriela Damián Miravete
Stars: Julia Dolores Raimundo, Julieta Sarafina Amaya, Eliseete Ramirez Carbajal
Synopsis: Deep in Mexico’s forests, two Indigenous mycologists seek to reconcile the past and present while reimagining the future for themselves and the changing world they inhabit.
During a restless, chaotic time in human history, reviewing films and writing about art becomes a bit of a difficult task. It’s unfathomable to ignore global suffering but it’s also as important to connect with various documentarians, and watch documentaries which chronicle the lives of regular, hardworking people. Documentary filmmaking will always be the conscience of the world, and Daughters of the Forest is no exception.
Daughters of the Forest is an immersive sci-fi documentary about the coexisting harmony between mushrooms and indigenous tribes in Mexico. Through two scientists who are armed with both their scientific knowledge, and the culture they carry on their backs from their indigenous origins, we get to watch as they navigate the world of ancient women in the family, mushroom gatherers trying to get by in a world where basic things like farming, agriculture, and vegetable gathering is becoming less of a necessity and more of a dying art.
Director Otilia Portillo Padua documents a world that is slowly grifted by the rise in fascist technology, wars, and climate emergencies. Defying the fear of extinction has become more of a responsibility for planetary repair. Codependent ecosystems and interspecies cooperation are terms that define the next stage of humanity, if people are serious about saving the planet from the hands of greedy, reckless billionaires.
The documentary mixes between stunning visuals and realistic scenes of the scientists Lis and Juli as they navigate a world of deforestation and agriculture decay. Those two women spend hours in the laboratory or out there in the wild, identifying and sampling breeds of mushrooms, understanding fungal behavior, mixing that with the wisdom of their ancestors and trying to tie that into how human behavior can be enhanced. Instead of saving the world through pushing for more technology that eats off the life and hard work of farmers and gatherers, professions that sound silly nowadays in the era of digitizing everything.
It’s bravery when someone decides to make an entire documentary about the life of mushrooms, and how fungi breathe, talk, and send messages. Padua mixes the lives of the scientists and their families, women who spend hours behind a microscope trying to refine the fine microcellular levels of a shaved mushroom stipe. She doesn’t just have those impressive, immersive beautiful shots of going inside the mycelium itself -the intricate root system of the mushroom- but she also integrates the culture of gatherers and secret keepers of the forest, the generations of mushroom collectors, the grandmas who know which one to eat, and which one to use for healing. She shows that culture and science go hand-in-hand, treating both the cottages of the guardians of the forest and the laboratories.
What it could’ve benefited from is a bit of a focus on the immersive scientific experience. For a while, it felt like Padua didn’t really know what she wanted to focus on. Is this a fully dedicated film to the wisdom of the elders, or a mycological adventure into the heart and soul of a fungus? I know that is purposeful on her part, but it still created a bit of a narrative ambiguity. Had this been absent, the documentary would be positioned differently. Still, these are not integral flaws, just a hushed whisper in the ears of a promising documentary filmmaker who the world definitely anticipates her next move.
In Daughters of the Forest, scientists are going out of their way to discover new ways of using up the planet’s resources without destroying it. It is a race against a time that is not on their side, as the bulldozers of tree loggers clear-cut acres and acres of trees, and as Lis’s mother says in the film “Without a forest, what will become of us?” The documentary poses questions and offers solutions that may salvage the planet when people still have time. But who is listening?
