There’s a double meaning in the title of Laurence Billiet and Rachael Antony’s new documentary: Australia’s giants of ecological activism – one in particular, the former Greens leader Bob Brown – and the kind that are made of wood and rooted in the ground. The film opens with vision from Tasmania’s Styx valley of Eucalyptus regnans, the tallest flowering plants on Earth. These trees are, as Brown puts it, “bigger than any of the dinosaurs … bigger than the blue whales” and “rooted in Australian soil”. The camera ascends next to one, climbing and climbing, reaching towards the heavens, as if comprehending its awesomeness.
This pairing of such majestic images with Brown’s commentary introduces this inspiring and elegantly crafted film’s two core elements, wrapped together like a double helix: Brown’s story and the story of the trees.
The former is easier to tell than the latter, with Brown on board to reflect on his life along with the likes of his twin sister, Jan, who remembers her brother as a “sensitive, shy, intelligent” child who was “a bit of a dreamer”. This human-centric strand threads together the expected materials – old photographs, news bulletins, home videos and interviews with Brown himself.
Capturing the story of trees and the complex interconnected ecosystems to which they belong, on the other hand, must have been an intimidatingly difficult job, even if Billiet and Antony don’t show it. Billiet’s previous production (which Antony worked on as script editor) was the documentary Freeman, which takes a beautifully tangential approach to Cathy Freeman’s life and career, contemplating, among other things, the idea of athleticism as a form of artistic expression. It was also visually interesting: Lillian Banks from the Bangarra Dance Theatre appears as “the spirit of Cathy” to perform interpretive dance in a dark, vaporous tableau.
To give the tree elements some aesthetic zhoosh in The Giants, the directors create point cloud animations rendered from 3D scans. These moments have a surreal, stylishly hollowed-out look that reminded me of how natural environments are presented in virtual reality productions like Awavena and On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World). In these experiences, an immersive simulation of the natural world engulfs our senses. In The Giants, the screen is two-dimensional but its renderings feel like spaces that are beckoning to be explored.
As a picture of Brown’s life, the film has plenty of interesting titbits: his mother was Presbyterian, for instance, and his father a police officer. As a young man, Brown struggled with his homosexuality (or more to the point, the shameful attitudes towards it) and signed up to “aversion therapy”. He recalls being “shown pictures of naked men and women and given an electric shock when there was a naked man”.
By the time the film reaches the famous fight to save Tasmania’s Franklin River (explored in the also excellent 2022 documentary Franklin), you understand the significance of that campaign in Brown’s life and, broadly, the ecological significance of the Franklin.
I say “broadly” because the directors can only scratch the surface of how trees function and the nature of the environments to which they belong, given their richness and complexity.
But on these points the film is often fascinating, ranging from the role algae plays in the forest to the beauty and diversity of fungus – which, in the words of one expert, “do things differently” and “feed in a variety of ways”, including by forming partnerships with trees to get nutrients.
There are interesting insights into Brown’s political career, including from the subject himself. After he and the former Greens senator Kerry Nettle interrupted George W Bush’s 2003 speech to Australian parliament about the war in Iraq, Brown thought “that could be the end of the Greens” and feared they “might be completely rejected at the next election”; of course, this was not how history unfolded. But Billiet and Antony always return to the wilderness and to various trees – among them Eucalyptus regnans, the Huon pine and myrtle beech – as if in spiritual consultation.
We all know that old idiom “can’t see the forest for the trees”. Few people would accuse Brown of that; he always had his eyes on a larger prize. Similarly, the film-makers never lose sight of the most important things, using the natural world to wrap an ancient context around contemporary politics and individual narratives. Their meditative tone could have felt starry-eyed or heavy-handed but instead The Giants is beautifully balanced, ruminative and rousing.
The Giants is in cinemas from Thursday 20 April
