Watch a Food Forest Come Alive on a Page

Food Forest Ketelbroek: A Motion Piece by Freek Freriks

Freek Freriks starts his short film on a drafting table. Grid paper. A mechanical pencil. The kind of surface where things get figured out before they get built.

Then the drawing starts to breathe.

Grass sprouts along the pencil lines. A sapling pushes up and thickens. The schematic stops being a plan and starts being a place. Seasons move through it. Leaves come, leaves go. And then the camera pulls back and the whole forest is sitting on a plate.

It is a film about Food Forest Ketelbroek, a pioneering project outside Nijmegen and the first food forest in the Netherlands.

But what makes it linger is how well it captures the actual idea of a food forest: that this is not wilderness, it is design.

Someone drew this. Someone thought through the canopy layers and the root systems and what would feed what. The wildness was planned.

Freriks finds the poetry in that without spelling it out. The drafting table and the dinner table are the same table.

See more of his work at freekfreriks.com.

Images © Freek Freriks