Using a metaphoric tree Abdellatif Benfaidoul tells lots of stories at the same time: his own personal story, the stories of the people around him in Holland, in Morocco and in other countries, the story of Africa, the story of nature and of the earth. Circles growing bigger and bigger in water are a lovely symbol for the parallels between all these small and big stories, an image consistent with a tree's growth rings. Benfaidoul's tree is dead, its trunk is stripped and grey, its branches sawn off and the gnarls dried out and cracked. Yet it is still able to tell its story. Like these echoing words in a voice that seems to issue out of the unfathomable depths of eternity: "One day, you will sit in the shade of a tree, your back against the trunk, you will feel the earth, you will almost be able to talk to it. Then, it will really tell you many stories." The tree is a witness to history, year after year, ring after ring it has stood there as part of the whole, until its life is suddenly ended. "I was torn apart by their carelessness," it says, and the shock of that echoes forever in its trunk.
The melancholy or, if you will, spirituality of the video changes midpoint into a despairing complaint. Whereas the tree at first still struggles to safeguard its universe, it later finds that "My struggle has absorbed all my energy, more energy than I ever spent on myself.". Whereas it once had "a great hope," it has now lost its feeling and its purpose. It ends its story with a sad "all is green except me". With this the great universal story seems to return to the confines of individual human depression. Unless you keep Africa in mind with its advancing deserts, with its for the West incomprehensible acceptance and its designation as lost continent.
- Lies Holtrop
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