A Thousand Pines, a co-production with ITVS and Latino Public Broadcasting, is an engrossing vérité documentary that depicts the day-to-day lives of migrant workers laboring in America’s lucrative timber industry. Following acclaimed screenings at numerous film festivals, including New York Latino, Workers Unite, Indie Memphis, DocsMX, Morelia, Green Film Festival of San Francisco, Hot Springs Documentary, and Buffalo International—where it won the Best Documentary Award—this insightful documentary continues its successful film festival run.
Additional in-person screenings are scheduled during February and March at the Alameda, Ocean City, San Diego Latino, and Houston Latino Film Festivals before its broadcast premiere on April 1, 2024, on PBS‘s acclaimed series Independent Lens.
Directed by Noam Osband and Sebastián Díaz, A Thousand Pines is set in the beautiful and sometimes unforgiving landscape of the United States’ national forests. The first documentary to tell the story of workers in the US timber industry follows Raymundo Morales, the foreman of a crew of migrant workers from Oaxaca, Mexico, who depend on the controversial guest worker visa program. Filmed over the course of a year, between their hometown and the US, they must make the decision every year if they will leave their families in rural Mexico, or if they will return for another eight-month season of planting commercial pine forests.
The documentary follows the crew for a year, during an entire season of planting and their short time back home with their families. They struggle to balance the job’s physical demands and its extreme isolation while remaining connected to their families back home. As the season progresses, they become a small family, cooking and caring for each other in order to endure the punishing work.
Raymundo is in his 20th season working for the largest reforestation company in the US. When he began, he was single and had few responsibilities. Now, however, he must balance his obligations to his wife, his children, and his elderly mother with a heart condition, while also tending to the needs and emergencies of the planting crew. For Raymundo, who spends a few months at home during the off-season, his job is both the family’s salvation and its heartbreak.
A Thousand Pines was born out of co-director Osband’s work as an anthropologist investigating American, Canadian, and Mexican tree planters. He worked several seasons in the role to understand the lives of workers inside the US wood production industry, the world’s largest producer of wood and paper products.
With unprecedented access inside the forestry industry and migrant communities, Osband and Díaz, himself an immigrant, take an emotional journey into a never-before-seen world of reforestation workers. Featuring two songs by Grammy-winning singer Lila Downs, A Thousand Pines is a tale of labor and family that shines a light into an underreported aspect of immigration and honors their sacrifices.
