Review of Once Upon a Time in a Forest (2024)
Seen in 2025.
Young activists with Extinction Rebellion chart the biodiversity of Finnish forests and work against logging. Meeting with market-friendly politicians, executives, corporate security cadres and police, they feel misunderstood.
One of the two main characters, Ida, has a grandfather who is allowed to speak on screen in favour of logging. His arguments are void, based on the assumption that old-growth forests are unnatural. The film is one-sided in its opposition to economic exploitation, and rightly so. A few scenes, especially one of freediving in a submerged forest, are overtly romantic, but the boredom, difficulty and legal hazard of activism are refreshingly plain to see. The work as a whole is better than “Rahčan — Ellas opprør” (2022).