An elegy in five parts
A visual and sonic elegy to the ancient olive trees of Puglia — and to the millennia of human culture they sustained — as an incurable disease destroys them forever.
The arrival of Xylella Fastidiosa in the southern Italian region of Puglia in 2013 has brought unprecedented change upon the region, killing millions of olive trees and decimating olive oil production. Many of these trees predate Christ. The men and women who have cared for them across the centuries are the last in an unbroken line reaching back to the Neolithic. As Leaves Turned Brown bears witness to this singular moment of loss.
Through a series of vignettes, the film moves from the hypnotic beauty of the ancient groves to the daily rhythms of their caretakers, to the olive harvest and the frantoio, and finally to the desolation left in the wake of a disease that knows no cure. It is a rumination not on politics or science, but on what is lost when a landscape loses its certainty.