"A Thousand Pines" Film Screening and Director Q&A
October 30, 2024
Migration Studies Lab Film Series
Start time: 4:00 p.m.
End time: 5:45 p.m.
Location: Academic Learning Commons, Room 2104 (1000 Floyd Ave)
Description
Join the HRC's Migration Studies Lab for a special screening of the award-winning ethnographic film A Thousand Pines, followed by a virtual Q&A with director and anthropologist Noam Osband.
A Thousand Pines shows the lives of migrants who depend on the controversial guest worker visa program, following a crew of workers from Oaxaca, Mexico over the course of a season planting trees throughout the United States. The crew struggles 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. The film centers on the crew foreman, Raymundo Morales, who is in his 19th 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. Spending only three months at home during the off-season, Raymundo’s job is both the family’s salvation and its heartbreak.
About the Director
Noam Osband is a filmmaker, radio producer, and anthropologist. His first feature was the nationally broadcast film Adelante, and his documentary The Radical Jew won Best Short Doc at the Charlotte and Tallgrass Film Festivals. He is also a radio and print journalist, whose bylines include The Atlantic, BBC4, Criminal, and Freakonomics Radio.