Song From the Forest
By Sameer Chhabra
Director Michael Obert’s 2013 documentary Song From the Forest is a supremely dull film about an American man who finds solace and solitude in the Central African jungle. It is a film about an outsider—a white man—who is accepted into a local tribe and though the film’s synopsis attempts to suggest otherwise, Obert’s camera captures what is effectively a fish-out-of-water story. The film tells the story of Louis Sarno, an American man who left his home 25-years-ago in order to spend his life with the Bayaka Pygmies, a tribe of hunters and gatherers who dwell within the Central African rainforest. In his time as an outsider, Sarno learned both the Bayaka language and customs, eventually marrying a local woman and fathering a son. Sarno’s son, Samedi, is the source of the film’s central conceit: Louis hopes to take Samedi on a trip to New York City to provide the boy with a brief education of the western world.
Disappointing is the manner in which both Sarno and Obert fail to capitalize on the opportunity to focus on Samedi’s quest. The boy is the son of an altruistic outsider and a local woman; one never fails to consider the squandered opportunity to centralize the film’s narrative to explore Samedi’s character. We briefly see Samedi’s interactions with his friends and his father, but Obert’s camera and Sarno’s narration quickly return to discussing Sarno’s motivations for remaining with the Bayaka.
The question is left unanswered—not for the sake of ambiguity, but because the answer is so woefully obvious in the first place. Sarno ran away from the western world—America in particular—because he had grown disillusioned with his home’s abandonment of humanity in favour of wealth and human capital.
The film’s chief problem is Obert’s refusal to adhere to a single thesis. Sarno is Obert’s subject, but the Bayaka are Sarno’s chief interest. This conflict between the director’s and subject’s intentions split the film into unsatisfying portions.
First, habitat destruction had led to the destruction of the forest’s natural ecosystem. Next, poaching has taken away the Bayaka’s food supply. A lack of foreign aid has contributed to the Bayaka peoples’ problems securing their homeland, while a cultural shift in the younger Bayaka population has prevented key cultural markers from being passed on to subsequent generations. These issues are all intertwined with Sarno’s own personal narrative—one of loss, hardship, and maladjustment—but little time is given to unpack any of these problems, let alone Sarno’s own story.
Ultimately, Song From the Forest is an ideological and narrative mess that fails precisely because it attempts to tackle too many “important issues” in too little time. To divulge the secret of the film’s title: the subject of music is repeatedly brought up as a matter of panhumanism, but the film treats this humanizing factor with all of the subtlety and panache of a film school first-draft.