Stories From The Chestnut Woods

On one side of the forest live the carpenter (Massimo De Francovich) and his wife. On the other, the young woman with the chestnut-coloured hair (Ivana Roscic). The carpenter works hard making coffins for strangers, counting his money on the long evenings in what seems like a perpetual Autumn. His wife fetches wood from the forest and water from the well, doing her duties, so he doesn’t notice that she’s slowly dying. The young woman sells chestnuts for a living, squirrelling away every little bit she an. She dreams only of leaving this place.

One day the carpenter and the young woman will meet, riding on the cart that seems to be the region’s only transportation, and exchange all manner of stories.

Nesting one tale within another like a series of wooden dolls, this is a film full of strange characters and half-remembered incidents which may or may not ever have been true. This is a liminal place, on the border between Italy and Slovenia – a vast forest of chestnut trees which became home to numerous displaced people during Europe’s great wars and which is still home to their descendants today, with little seeming to have changed across the gulf of time. In the forest, one day is much like another, so that the passing of years or even decades goes by unnoticed, death catching people by surprise. The line between life and death is itself an uncertain thing; this place is ripe with ghosts, or hallucinations.

“We live in a forgotten place. Don’t you see? Nothing is possible here,” it is said, and yet everything is – just nothing that seems capable of offering salvation.

Everything revolves around the chestnuts and their colours saturate the film. The carpenter loves to remark on the quality of their wood. Director Gregor Bozic brings us so close in to the grain that we can almost smell it. Out among the trees, leaves crunch and the wind whispers. Jan Vysocy’s soundscape is huge, overwhelming. It reminds us of the smallness of the human characters. This is a place in which individual human lives seem to have no meaning. Men gamble. Musicians and singers wander through homes as if strutting across a stage. To express ambition is to be promptly put in one’s place. “That’s not for the likes of us.”

Stories gather like dust amid the silence of the trees.