ONCE UPON A TIME… OUR FORESTS

Once upon a time our forests take us on a wonderful Human Adventure, one that has united Europeans and their forest for 12,000 years. An epic story divided into three episodes: that of the conquest of the forest, from the appearance of agriculture to the disaster of the Great Plague; that of its virtual disappearance after the Great Discoveries, with the explosion in the wood needs of European navies, until the Industrial Revolution; and finally, that of the return of the forest with the first massive reforestation and the birth of ecological thinking in the 19th century up to the threats weighing on the contemporary forest.

A cultural history of the forest that we will discover by bringing the Europeans themselves back to life through evocative sequences which will open each sequence: we will follow the hunter-gatherers who benefit from the wealth provided by the rebirth of the forest in Europe with the ice retreat; we will be with the first farmers from the East who, for the first time, will profoundly modify the forest landscape, but we will also go into the forests of the Iron Age with the “barbarian” tribes who protect themselves from the invader Roman, in the abbeys of the first monks, who cleared entire sections of the European forest, as with the peasants who fought against the capture of the forest by the feudal lords, and with the first forestry agents put in place by the monarchs in order to to protect the forest etc.

Through these evocations, always filmed in natural settings, we will see the transformation of the forest, the species that make it up, the animals that live there... but above all we will see another story of Europe unfold, epic, often overlooked. because discovered through a new prism: that of the intimate and saving link which has linked Europeans to their forest for millennia.

Incarnated by the same actors, from era to era, from place to place – because our story will travel across Europe from North to South and from East to West – this story will also bring to life a very rich iconography and give the word, always in sequences and natural settings, to historians and archaeologists, who, for around twenty years, by leaving cities and plowed fields, have profoundly changed the knowledge of forests and their centuries-old history, by mobilizing several scientific disciplines, such as forest ecology, paleoecology or bioarcheology.

Directors : Thibaud Marchand (eps. 1/2) and Camille Robert (ep. 3)

Authors : Thibaud Marchand and Camille Robert

Production : O2B Films

Broadcaster : ARTE

Running time : 3 x 60 min

In production