![]() When I found out that Elzéard Bouffier was in fact a fictitious person, I was disappointed. I sketched a series of images immediately. Giono had put into words everything that I wanted to express in my drawings. … moved me deeply, because it is a lesson of patience and generosity. He discovered the story in a 1974 issue of Le Sauvage, a French-language environmentalist journal. Giono’s original piece was so evocative and convincing that many readers thought the shepherd character, Elzéard Bouffier, was a real person.īack was among them. A French author, Jean Giono, had published it in the 1950s. “I absolutely had to do this film,” he later said, “because it symbolizes all the good that human beings can accomplish.” ![]() Decades pass - and the dead earth is renewed with life, all because of one person’s “constant, magnificent generosity.”įrédéric Back was a tree-planter himself, in his spare time, and the production of this awe-inspiring film cost him five years of his life. They meet a few times over the years as the shepherd continues his quiet work, alone and in secret. ![]() The shepherd, he learns, is planting trees. If you don’t know the outline, The Man Who Planted Trees is about a Frenchman who stumbles across a shepherd on a barren stretch of land. Which is to say: a work of art so clearly good for you that it starts to feel like an obligation, like studying.īut Back’s 30-minute masterpiece always evades that trap. ![]() The Man Who Planted Trees is a film so widely praised, for so many years, that it risks the trap of becoming too much of a classic. Stills from The Man Who Planted Trees (full film embedded below - or you can rent the remastered edition on Vimeo )
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