Director: Or Schaap
Writer: Or Schaap
Running time: 45mins
Wall: A Story about Two Gardens in Three Parts is a hybrid film, presenting itself as an experimental documentary, but which also hinges largely on the vivid description of fictional events. By the time its 45 minutes have run, what it wanted to achieve with this unique cinematic mode is no clearer than when it began.
I can roughly tell you what happens. That is, not very much. The camera mostly follows some kind of farming collective, performing various tasks in an environmentally-friendly gardening commune. Interspersed with this is one of the farmers describing a dream they had, and is bookended by a narrator who seems invested in telling us as little as possible, while seemingly aiming to making us feel like idiots for not just knowing what is going on.
It’s an interesting approach, because you would think a film which loosely professes to be about permaculture and ethical crop production might want to dispel a certain number of preconceptions audiences will have going into it. Namely: that people who are smug, middle-class tossers – trust-fund babies comfortably numb to the material reality of the lives the rest of the world lives, waxing lyrical about how the rest of us should reinsert ourselves into nature’s great tapestry. But Or Schaap isn’t concerned with such things – happily leaning into every hippie stereotype going, and opening his film with a waffling treatise on sun-rises.
His bafflingly off-putting script, delivered by narrator TJ Querio, postures performatively, trying to look like it wants to challenge preconceptions – while doing precisely the opposite. Have you ever thought about the phrase “It’s always darkest before the dawn”? Well, according to him, it is nonsense, because the night sky actually increasingly bright before dawn. This would be mind-blowing, if you understand dawn as the moment when the sun appears – which it isn’t. Dawn is the time that marks the beginning of twilight before sunrise, and a quick check of Wikipedia reveals dawn is recognised “by the appearance of indirect sunlight being scattered in Earth’s atmosphere, when the centre of the Sun’s disc has reached 18° below the observer’s horizon.” So, it is darkest before that point, because dawn is the first moment of indirect sunlight on the horizon.
The point here was that the idea of things being darkest before dawn was supposedly a bad phrase, because it suggests that a bad situation will be suddenly resolved, whereas real change hinges on many small shifts that are eventually recognised as one great transformation. But that is literally what the dawn is, so challenging our linguistic understanding of it on this basis doesn’t have the effect he thinks it does.
The second-rate philosophy is underscored by the revelation that the apparent sunrise we have seen this monologue accompanied by is actually a sunset played in reverse – proving to us that we are utter rubes who cannot decipher anything for ourselves, adding an extra sour taste to things. Because, even aside from my admittedly pedantic point, it gets the film underway in a way that seems to manipulatively chastise the viewer into doubting common linguistic assumptions, in order to make its future statements more credible. I would maybe even go as far at to suggest there is a kind of cultish gaslighting going on here… were it not for the fact that the film doesn’t manage to follow it up with any actionable information in the following 40 minutes.
After the opening, you might expect the next details to be who the characters are that we are following, why they are farming in the manner depicted, and why you will feel 100% better about yourself if you get involved. But instead, we spend several protracted scenes with different-but-the-same people – plummy-voiced, slim, tanned people between 20 and 40, sporting perfectly curated teeth and messy buns – speaking about how their plot of land somewhere in the Netherlands is helping them ‘recognise what the land wants’.
What the land wants, on the basis of what we are shown, is for everyone to escape their lives in the city, and ‘get some dirt on their hands’ in the service of vegetables so removed from the circle of life that they can no longer propagate on their own. Yes, what the dwindling wild spaces of a country as small and densely populated as the Netherlands definitely wants is for everyone to start growing organic courgettes on their own smallholding.
There may be sound scientific reasons as to why the project the film centres could be scaled, without leading to another ecological catastrophe, and it may well relate to the phrase ‘permaculture’ – which is thrown about once or twice without definition or elaboration. But that is precisely the problem. The film never feels the need to actually try and convince us of anything. We’re just supposed to accept this would be great, and we ought to get right to it – to the extent that in the narrator’s closing epilogue, it is presented as a joke that he won’t be explaining anything. “Don’t even get me started on permaculture…”
As you wish. But even if we aren’t to get the filmmaker ‘started’ on permaculture, or the myriad of sustainable practices that supposedly differentiate this way of life from our current mode of production (again, there is no contrast presented for our benefit on either front), even if we look past the flimsy suggestion that in the face of massive systemic changes, making small impacts on a local level can add up to the different solutions we need for what is becoming an existential crisis for humanity, there is still a huge elephant in the room.
Alright, it’s simple enough for you all as the spawn of bankers and lawyers to just slum it on a commune for a couple of years. How would you like for the rest of us to do that, exactly? Are the two gardens (the locations and perimeters of which remain a mystery) publicly accessible? Are there other such locations which people can undertake such a project, or will we need easy access to capital to access the land and materials needed to farm in this way?
The fact that the film never comes remotely close to asking or answering these questions suggests it isn’t really for any of that. But then, what is it for at all? Simply proving, as middle-class ecologists are wont to do – that they are more virtuous and committed to saving the planet than the rest of us unwashed masses? Reassuring those people that they can feel good about the choice to withdraw from society to grow runner-beans in rural Holland while the rest of the world burns? How truly courageous.
There is definitely something to find worth saying about changing the model of farming to be in tune with nature. But Wall never comes close to saying it. That’s not the only missed-opportunity, either. One of the things loosely mentioned as drawing the gardeners together is a sense of ‘community’ – and without exception, it seems that these are what people euphemistically call ‘expats’ in the Netherlands. How does this commune interact with Dutch nationals, or civic life. Are there tensions which mean they have been pushed to the periphery, or have they chosen to remove themselves from the ugly debates currently manifesting in the nation’s politics with the help of some rather more traditionally fascistic farmers – and do they not feel they ought to be getting involved before it is too late? This would have been far more interesting to explore than the long-winded and meandering dream recollection we are instead delivered, in which one of them thinks they communed with the Earth – however good the accompanying music from the artist credited as yourfriendkas was.
Alternatively, to borrow a thought from IFL’s Tony Moore, another radically different – and more engaging – movie would feature a rag-tag gang of obese working-class chain-smokers in synthetic jogging pants, with NHS teeth, hectoring us about the vital importance of converting food waste into biomass. Those people exist out there somewhere – but for some reason nobody with a fancy camera ever seeks them out…