Urwald

If cognitive science were to state just one idea, it would probably be: neuroplasticity. Brains, it turns out, are remarkably malleable, and keep changing. As they do, so too does the mind, and the self. We are not fixed entities, but live through a succession of different selves, and what we hold onto instead is the narrative thread that holds these selves together. We are the story we tell our selves.

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But stories can have a peculiar power of their own. Sometimes a story wants to be told in a certain way — perhaps in spite of our selves. As though the story were telling its self, in its own voice, and we merely playing along.

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In a forest, every tree is a life form, branching and changing according to its own private logic. But greater movements move through the forest, and it thinks in a sense as one.

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As we struggle to tell the realities in which we live, we are searching for the threads and unifying movements. We are, on a daily basis, transforming the chaotic experience of being into the coherent story of an I. But what if the threads unwind, or the movement gets lost, or cut off? What if the story is taking you to somewhere in the forest you don’t want to be, and where you no longer recognise the path?

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You go deeper into the story, the voice, the forest.

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Urwald is a feature length film-with-music by composer and director Arnoud Noordegraaf and writer Adrian Hornsby.