"A mesmerizing documentary." Variety
"A delicately seductive flow of scenes." The Hollywood Reporter
"A charming and beautifully filmed story." Screen International
"Spellbinding Documentary…" Dot Earth New York Times
SONG FROM THE FOREST will open theatrically in the US beginning on April 10 in New York, April 17 in Los Angeles and other cities across the nation after that.
New York | April 10
CINEMA VILLAGE
Director and Subjects will be attending
Los Angeles | April 17
LAEMMLE PASADENA PLAYHOUSE 7
other cities to be announced soon for further information click here: WWW.SONGFROMTHEFOREST.COM
The Story
As a young man, US-born ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno heard a song on an Afropop the PRI radio program that never let him out of its grasp. He followed the mysterious sounds back to the Central African rainforest, found his music with the Bayaka pygmies – and never came back. Today, 25 years later, Sarno is a full member of this community of hunters and gatherers. He has a son with a Bayaka woman, 13-year-old Samedi. As a baby, Samedi became seriously sick. As he lay dying, Sarno held him the whole night and promised him: “If you survive, one day I will show you the world from which I came.”
Now it is time to keep his promise, and so Sarno travels with his son from the African rainforest to a different jungle made of concrete, glass and asphalt – to New York City.
The award-winning documentary SONG FROM THE FOREST – A FILM BY MICHAEL OBERT takes us on this incredible journey with father and son providing an intimate reflection on the meaning of fatherhood and the sense of belonging. Sarno and Samedi meet family and friends including Sarno’s college roommate filmmaker/musician Jim Jarmusch, whose films Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog (1999) include characters reminiscent of Sarno and his life story.
SONG FROM THE FOREST narrates their victories, but also their defeats in a modern epic in which the shared journey of father and son steers towards a surprising reversal of roles and gives the viewer an intimation that the African rainforest and urban America, these apparently separated worlds, are not all that separate after all. Torn from his familiar surroundings, Sarno‘s fragile world is off balance in the US. The music of the Bayaka, existing only in his memory and the recordings he made becomes his inner voice and gives its pulse to the film. This traditional African music produces a tense contrast to the images from the contemporary US and evokes memories of the forest. The immense cultural divide between the Central African rainforest and the concrete jungle of New York City, rendered in the hypnotically atmospheric soundtrack as well as in patient and intimate images, forms a compelling and unifying backdrop to the various strands of the film. SONG FROM THE FOREST is a modern epic set between rainforest and skyscrapers.
XXX
Raymond Lo
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