Outdoors: Trees are the stars of the show in a film festival for nature lovers

Woodlands are proven to have healing qualities, and a meander over the moss and fern of the forest floor is usually an antidote to what has gone on in the office the previous week.

However, while crunching over the pine cones, it doesn’t occur to most of us that 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity is contained in these powerhouses of vegetation, or that woodlands provide a living for 1.6 billion people.

If the stats don’t register, though, a fascinating forest film festival to be screened at this year’s Wild Connections event in Perthshire is certain to get the human message across about the true value of healthy woodlands.

This year is the United Nations Year of Forests. In order to celebrate sustainable forest development, the UN’s Forum on Forests Secretariat (UNFFS) has formed a collaboration with the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.

The result is the International Forest Film Festival, a carnival of moving imagery which gets to the beating heart of the forest story.

Premiered in New York in February to 192 global UN delegates, the films are now heading for Perthshire’s Big Tree Country in a major coup for the organisers of the Wild Connections wildlife festival.

At Wild Connections, you can learn to make wild chocolate, track white-tailed sea eagles across Tayside and taste Crann-apple cider as part of a nine-day festival which encompasses more than 30 events. However, the screening of the winning films will rightly be the centre-piece of the festivities.

“By commissioning the film festival, the UN wanted to use what they called, ‘the universal power of cinematic art’ to try to take people’s awareness and comprehension of forest issues to the next level.

“Some of the films come from the most remote parts of the world and they are moving ways to examine the relationships between forests, people and the planet,” says May East of United Nations Institute for Training and Research.

One of the films on show, Hope in a Changing Climate won in its category for offering solutions to sustainability issues facing the people of the remote Loess Plateau in China. It is an inspiring story of how a degraded forest ecosystem of 35,000km of land now supports a rich tapestry of life, and has also become the source of new economic and social wellbeing for its inhabitants. Over a ten-year period, the people of the Chinese highlands, who had been trapped in poverty, helped regenerate the damaged ecosystem, building a platform for sustainable agriculture.

With the regeneration of the Caledonian Pine Forest in Scotland becoming a hot topic, the lessons of the film are sure to appeal to conservationists here.

“It is a very powerful film. A whole village of heroes has done incredible things on a plateau about the size of Belgium. The landscape was formerly very barren but it has been brought back to life by villagers who have built terraces, altered the ecosystem and created a micro-climate which also uses the rainfall in a very clever way.”

“We have longer films as well as short, hard-hitting films and people are enjoying the variety,” May East adds.

Hosting such a festival in Perthshire is apt and entirely in sync with the role of forests in providing livelihoods for people. Forest-related tourism is worth £1.8 million a year to the Perthshire economy and some of the most notable tree specimens in Europe are found in the locale.

Understandably, the area is proud to host such an internationally lauded event. “Ultimately, the collections will have travelled all the way from the UN’s New York offices to Birnam in Highland Perthshire so it is very exciting to be able to bring a film festival of this calibre to the local people,” says Paul McLennan of Perthshire Big Tree Country.

“Wild Connections is part of a range of activities designed to encourage people to explore the outdoors, and to raise awareness of Scottish flora and fauna.”

If you can’t make the screenings, there are plenty other attractions for young and old this year. Children can even “meet” David Douglas, the famous Perthshire plant hunter who travelled the world, risking all manners of dangers to bring the most beautiful and exotic plant specimens back to the UK.

Douglas, whose global excursions gave rise to the Douglas Fir would have approved of a forest film festival. More than likely, though, he wouldn’t have sat still long enough to watch much.

Wild Connections runs from 8-16 October, visit www.wildconnections.org.uk for the full programme.