The second life of burned trees

Storyline

In The Second Life of Burned Trees Anna Vasof becomes the documentarian of a living environment already stricken by catastrophe. After the forest fires in Greece in the summer of 2022 sucked the life out of them, the trees emerge like silhouettes against the ocher backdrop of devastated olive groves as mere shadows of themselves – charred but imposing skeletons. Their deep-rooted, gnarled, crooked trunks and twisted branches bear witness to a symbiosis with the environment that has lasted for centuries. At the same time, they fire the imagination of their viewers who then, in the grotesque shapes and patterns, see something completely different – would-be faces and figures.
In her hybrid animation film, Anna Vasof demonstrates this phenomenon of perception known as pareidolia. But moreover, in addition she allows the audience to participate in the creative outgrowths of her mind by bringing the characteristic physiognomies, poses, and gestures of her imagined creatures into view through incisive staging. Taking her role as animation artist as literally as the title of her film, she breathes new life into the motionless matter with the help of minimalistic effects: a blinking reptile, a snapping bird, and a man having a smoke while he intones a quiet, lethargic lament to the smoldering heat.

About the film/director

Anna Vasof is an architect and media artist. Born in 1985, she studied architecture at the University of Thessaly (2010) in Greece and Transmedia Art (2014) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2004 her videos and short movies have been presented in several festivals, some of them were receiving awards. She´s currently working on designing and building innovative mechanisms for producing critical videos, actions and installations.
FILMOGRAPHY:
• Floating Garden (2005)
• Artur´s Klaket (2006)
• Animal´s War (2006)
• Corpus (2007)
• No entry (2008)
• Hansaplast crisis edition (2008)
• Stairstories (2011)
• Commercial Break (2011)
• Heute gibts keine Heute (2012)
• Soupline (2013)
• Footnotes (2013)
• Domino (2014)
• One more leap for Mankind (2014)
• Down to earth (2014)
• When times move faster (2016)
• Things and Wonders 2022 (2017)
• Muybridges´s Disobedient Horses (2018)
• Things and Wonders 2227 (2018)
• Hitting my head on the world (2019)
• Amazon Woman (2021)
• Saving some random insignificant stories (2022)
• Issues with my other half (2023)
• The second life of burned trees (2023)

Credits

Director:

Anna Vasof

Script:

Anna Vasof

Producer:

Anna Vasof

Contact:

Isabelle Piechaczyk

E-Mail:

isabelle@sixpackfilm.com

• Austria

• no dialogue
• 2023
• 6 min