It’s hard to make out which images are from the past and which are from now, just like when the director looks into the mirror in the house of her great-grandparents and sees different generations of the maternal line reflected in it at the very same time, the same women who used to make figurines in clay and sing songs to the guitar-like vihuela. The house is in the forest, in the mountains: gnarled trunks, rushing water, verdant leaves and shimmering blooms captured on celluloid that blends colour and texture into one ravishing whole. But this natural paradise is no longer what it once was, as wildfires have scorched away the ancient oaks and the undergrowth around them.
When the man on horseback drags a wooden cross behind him through the now-barren terrain, it’s as if he’s mourning the very landscape itself. The monocultural pines set by the government are no replacement, just more fodder for the timber industry, waiting to be fed into the vast chipper whose spray of wooden fragments submerge the director’s naked body in shards and splinters. “Green Desert” is a hugely personal essay film full of beauty, anger and regret, linking the history of a family to the wider traditions that shaped their lives and the changes wrought on a specific region of Chile to a broader environmental malaise.