Ever experienced how time seems to slow down and speed up? Days can crawl by and yet years can seem to fly by... filmmaker and director of the Electric Palace cinema, Rebecca E Marshall, talks about her work exploring the passage of time through visiting a hermit in Siberia, talking to astronauts isolated on a Hawaiian volcano practicing living on Mars, and writing a letter to her young son in the future.
The Forest in Me is a film as a gift from a mother to her child for when he leaves home in the future. The film shares stories of people cut off from the world to examine how they might stay connected: An elderly hermit Agafya Lykova survives alone in the vast Siberian forest; a crew live isolated in a hi-tech pod on a volcano as a simulation of life on Mars; footage of the child's life shows him exploring the world for his first time.
The film presents a mix of home movie footage, ethnographic documentary, self-ethnography, and interviews, linked together by a narration voiced by Marshall herself. Through voiceover and montage, 'The Forest in Me' explores in an essayistic fashion topics that include time, technology, communication, memory, survival, love, and human relationships.