Victor Kossakovsky’s New Documentary ‘Holy Wood Dust’ Asks You to See Trees as Sentient Beings

When Victor Kossakovsky walks into a forest, he isn’t just looking for pretty shots; he’s hunting for a story that makes you reconsider the very definition of “life.” The Russian‑born auteur, best known for the tender animal portrait Gunda (2020) and the wordless, fish‑scale‑returning meditation Trillion, has added another chapter to his self‑styled “empathy trilogy.” This time the subject is something that has probably stood in your living‑room during the holidays – a tree.

‘Holy Wood Dust’ will make its world debut on September 6 at the Venice Film Festival, screened in the Open – Out of Competition slot. The film is a collaboration with Italian botanist and writer Stefano Mancuso, whose research on plant neurobiology underpins the movie’s central claim: trees are not passive scenery, they are beings equipped with up to twenty different senses.

“What happens to a stump the second after a tree is cut down? What does that tree think and feel at that very moment?” Kossakovsky asks in the festival’s official synopsis. The answer, according to the director, is both poetic and unsettling. He wants us to imagine the disorientation of a century‑old organism as its world is shattered in an instant.

He tells the story of his childhood curiosity – a leaf plucked from a bush, a mother’s sudden lesson that the plant “feels pain” just as we do. “If I pull a hair, it hurts. So does the bush,” he recalls, a memory that has haunted him ever since. Years later, while living in Berlin, he cracked a dead leaf under a microscope and was stunned by the frantic activity of cells trying to seal a wound. “It was like watching our own blood clot,” he says. That microscopic glimpse sparked the question that became the film’s backbone: what does a tree do when we cut it down?

The answer isn’t easy to capture – you can’t simply lug a microscope into the forest. Yet Kossakovsky and his crew, cinematographer Gianmarco Donaggio and editor Ainara Vera, managed to turn the invisible into a visual experience that feels as sprawling as Tolstoy’s War and Peace. “The tree looks confused, it’s suffering, it’s trying to heal and also to fight,” the director explains, recalling a scene where a centuries‑old oak trembles as a chain‑saw bites into its bark.

Production is a joint effort between Be Water Film, Solaria Film, RAI Cinema, Oceanika, Allegra Films and Doppelplusultra Filmproduktion. In Italy, Be Water Film will handle distribution while RAI Cinema takes charge of sales. The film’s tone, Kossakovsky says, is “part Christmas carol, part philosophical meditation.” He hopes the gentle, almost lyrical approach will plant the seed of empathy in viewers, because, as he puts it, “art may not stop the bullets of today, but stories rooted in empathy can nurture a more peaceful future.”

When asked why he isn’t done with his “empathy” movies, Kossakovsky smiles and points to Fellini’s influence. “There’s a scene in ‘La Strada’ where the camera lingers on a simple object, making it feel alive. I wanted that same reverence for a tree, for a plant, for any living thing we tend to ignore.”

‘Holy Wood Dust’ promises to be more than a documentary; it’s an invitation to listen to the rustle of leaves as if they were words, to feel the shiver of sap as a heartbeat. Whether you leave the cinema with a new respect for the Christmas tree in your living room or a deeper curiosity about the forest’s secret life, Kossakovsky’s latest work aims to make one thing clear: the forest is not a backdrop, it’s a living, breathing character.