How to Download a Forest

18m

Moving through herbariums and expedition sites in Portugal, the film reveals the Sisyphean task of data collection and knowledge production. Everyday people set out to find a little more about the world and each new information expands our world infinitely. The title gestures toward an impossible task: to categorise and hold the living world within an archive. Driven by preservation, we are challenged by history and forced to admit that something always escapes our systems. How to Download a Forest is a human story and about how small we are. It slowly becomes clear that the world does not need us to know it, but we keep trying anyway.