The Pine Barrens

Feature Documentary/Live Documentary Performance

Screened with live score performed by The Ruins of Friendship Orchestra

2019 104 minutes

Full Project at www.pinebarrensfilm.com

The Pine Barrens is a sprawling, elegiac film…tinged with a deep sense of nostalgia, a reckoning of marginalized pasts, and a look forward to an uncertain future.
- Hyperallergic

Stream on Amazon

Rooftop Films Summer Series
Mimesis Festival
Awareness Festival
Wildlife Conservation Film Festival
Lighthouse International Film Festival
Best Documentary - New Jersey Film Festival
Excellence Award - Veritas Film Festival
Emerging Filmmaker - Princeton Environmental Film Festival
Best Documentary - Jim Thorpe Independent Film Festival
Emerging Filmmakers Award - Princeton Environmental Film Festival

The Pine Barrens is a film that explores the symbiotic yet frequently destructive relationship between man and nature in a strange and unlikely wilderness within New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the US. Through intimate moments with individuals connected to the land, The Pine Barrens reveals the influence of place on identity during a period of gradual loss of both a way of life and the environment that gave birth to it.

Simulating the effect of folklore passed down through aural traditions, evolving 2012-2018 editions of The Pine Barrens were presented as a “living” documentary, created as several experimental shorts and a semi-improvisational score. These editions were intended to show the New Jersey Pinelands, a place whose character was constantly in flux and unknowable. A festival version of the feature-length film was completed in 2019.

Produced and directed by David Scott Kessler