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The Oak and its inhabitants, by Laurent Charbonneau and Michel Seydoux, was released in French cinemas on Wednesday. A documentary fiction that brings together all the animal species that live thanks to this major tree in European forests.
« They are all good actors! I think the field mice are great, the jays are quite good too, they manage, very very strong, they transmit emotions… Producer and director Michel Seydoux is proud of his actors, furry and feathered, the main characters as well as the supporting roles, who gravitate around this oak, a 110-year-old tree, filmed under all its branches, in the forest of Chambord, by wildlife filmmaker Laurent Charbonneau.
Fourteen months of filming over the seasons, from spring to spring, 350 hours of images and 44 weeks of editing to end up with a little naturalistic gem: The Oak and its inhabitantsa film of nearly 1h30, released in France on Wednesday February 23, where all the actors play their own roles.
Abundant nature
Filming had started with the first anti-Covid lockdown in March 2020. “ There was no longer a plane in the sky, no longer a lumberjack with a chainsaw, remembers Michel Seydoux. There were no more walkers, there was no more anything, there was no more hunting, no more disturbing element, and so all of a sudden the animals were all together around the tree.»
Which gives exceptional and almost surreal scenes where on the same plane appear for example a heron, a deer, wild boars… An ideal and abundant nature. ” There are scenes that we didn’t dare to edit, it sounded like a “demonstration for the power of animals”, there were so many species! Robins that come in the legs of deer, these are things that we do not see often. »
Noah’s tree
The oak is the hero of the Oak , a “Noah’s tree”, as Laurent Charbonneau called the original project, planted in the heart of this ecosystem. The oak is primarily a host that welcomes and shelters many species: the squirrel, which has built its house of branches and twigs at the highest point. The barn owl, which sleeps in a hole in the trunk. The field mice that have built their burrow under its roots…
It is also, and above all, a nourishing oak; everyone snatches their fruits! The acorn is a character in itself. ” When we worked on the scenario, we made the list of all the animals for which the acorn was important, says Michel Seydoux. The deer that eat them, or the field mice that transport them and put them in their burrows as a reserve for the winter, the jays that will plant them – at the time of the ice age, the forest advanced almost 500 meters per year thanks to the jays and squirrels that carried them.»
At the heart of an ecosystem
The acorns also serve as a nursery for the balanin, an insect with a long curved proboscis: the female pierces the acorn and lays there, for the larva to feed on.
In The Oak , there are scenes of sex, tenderness, a chase… It’s animal life in a superb film that celebrates living together in nature. Where everything is. ” You have an ecosystem around a tree, you have species that are independent; if you break that system, everything disappears. So it’s knowing how to live together, the indispensability of some in relation to others. So obviously from time to time, there are a few who get eaten out, c’est la vie! But what gives me a lot of hope,concludes Michel Seydoux,is that people can, with their culture, in each place, understand the importance of protecting this tremendous biodiversity.»
“How do we know that the oak in the film is 110 years old? »
Don’t worry, we didn’t cut it to determine its age. We only inserted an auger, a small device, into the trunk to take a fine core of wood, and thus count the tree rings, the growth circles formed each season, since the tree stops growing in the fall. The narrower the rings, the less the tree has grown. Especially because of the drought, while the oak needs about 200 liters of water per day. In a tropical climate, on the other hand, there are no tree rings, or almost, since there is no season: the trees grow throughout the year.