Director: Delia Simonetti

Synopsis: “I see trees of green” is a stream-of-counsciousness film, based on the lyrics of the big success of Louis Armstrong “What a Wonderful World”, written by Bob Thiele (as “George Douglas”) and George David Weiss in 1967. The lyrics, deprived of the famous chorus, create a new meaning more similar to contemporary spoken word poetry. The voice over is mine, and as I had to stop acting when I was 13 after the diagnosis of a vocal chord paralysis, to start performing again is, in the end, an act of hope. The sound is immersive, mixing raw recording from smartphone and dreamy sound landscapes. As the song was composed in order to find back a lost harmony in the troubled 60s, it finds a new purpose now, as we are forced to a new view of and on nature: a nature we must defend from pollution, massive deforestation and extinctions, and a nature that we mostly see through a screen, through smartphone cameras, on social medias and even through security drones that helps us preserve it but affect our privacy. The nature narrated in this film is personal, intimate, based on memories, videos shot by smartphone, pictures shot with an old analogue camera and instinctive connections.

Bio: Delia Simonetti is a director and photographer based in Milan and London.

Program: Between Fashion and Music – VAEFF 2020