Birds chirp, leaves rustle, a woodpecker hammers. Then the idyll is suddenly torn apart by the rattling of an electric saw. A declaration of war on the forest paradise from which screeching birds fly. Again and again the film “Wood – Der geraubte Wald” finds such strong, sensual images for the plundering of nature parks and rainforests, for the destruction of protected forest stands, which are also habitats for animal species threatened with extinction such as the Siberian tiger.
At one point, the filmmakers let a drone fly over a dense rainforest until it circles over a bare cleared patch from which only a few isolated branches protrude – a shattering wound. The disease it causes is called human greed. Every now and then, the gaze falls on vast amounts of tree trunks that are drifting in the river, hoarded in warehouses and loaded onto trucks, without considering losses, some of them much too young and too thinly cut down. It was once said that at least 50 percent of the timber from Romania on the market is illegally cleared. In one of Schweighofer’s Romanian works alone, 5,000 cubic meters of wood are loaded every day, and the figure is said to be a total of 20 million cubic meters every year.
In contrast to the alarming numbers and images, the film exudes the level-headed calm and unpretentious presence of the German-American Alexander von Bismarck, who, as head of the American NGO “Environmental Investigation Agency” (EIA), has been working for years to understand the entanglements of business and politics, To prove profit maximization, power and corruption in the globally operating timber mafia. Ten years ago, the German documentary film director Michaela Kirst shot a film with him about illegal timber dealings, entitled “Tatort Regenwald – Undercover gegen die Holzmafia”.
Now she has teamed up with two colleagues, the Romanian Monica Lãzurean-Gorgan and the Austrian Ebba Sinzinger, to continue to publicize the global crimes of the international timber mafia. This is how the central story of the film came about, which leads from the Romanian nature parks with the last primeval forests on European soil to the Austrian timber giant Schweighofer. Unlike the Watergate thriller “All the President’s Men”, the motto here is not “follow the money”, but “follow the wood”. The journey goes from the Peruvian rain forest via the Siberian taiga to wood processing in China to the end users in the American hardware store, with the ominous name “Lumber Liquidators”.
The Forest Detective, a descendant of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
“We’re not working against a ticking time bomb,” says Alexander von Bismarck, who, as a descendant of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, is likely to have inherited a realpolitik gene: “We have time. We don’t have to risk anything,” is his slogan in the staff briefing. Sure, he works with the tools of the trade of international secret agents, with recordings from security cameras, with hidden listening devices and cameras and drones, he changes his look with different hair colors, hairstyles and beards and appears with fictitious identities sometimes as a buyer of wood, sometimes as a seller of wood .
The film, which is deliberately called wood and not forest, is an eco-thriller in the guise of an undercover agent thriller, but without the associated hectic pace. If one of his employees feels that he is being followed, he should simply sit in the café for hours until the opponent, for whom time is money, gives up. It is still dangerous, however. A Romanian forest minister, who did not want to bow to the demands of the powerful corporations, was poisoned with mercury, and several foresters who disturbed the wood thieves at work were murdered.
The EIA has staying power, the results of its undercover investigations are intended to use the press to sensitize public perception, set political changes in motion and change the system – along the lines of the constant dripping that erodes the stone. “No one does anything,” they say, there are laws, but no one cares about enforcing them. Through Bismarck and his team, the rights of the indigenous people of Peru are strengthened and the machinations of large companies such as Lumber Liquidators and Schweighofer are hindered. There is still a lot to do, the forest detectives are staying tuned.
Wood – The stolen forest, Ö/D/Romania 2020 – Written and directed by: Michaela Kirst, Monica Lãzurean-Gorgan, Ebba Sinzinger. With Alexander von Bismarck. Distribution: Filmtank GmbH, 97 minutes.