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Song from the Forest

Written & Directed by Michael Obert

Germany | USA | Central African Republic, 2013

From harmony comes peace. Michael Obert’s luminous documentary, Song from the Forest, is a celebration of one man’s harmony that resonates from the heart of the jungle. At the same time, there’s an undeniable melancholy lacing every frame. The result is a deceptively complicated film that captures the inscrutable beauty of finding one’s place in the world and the economic realities of preserving it.

When Louis Sarno heard the beguiling music of a Pygmy tribe playing on his radio in 1985, he couldn’t possibly imagine that it would change his life forever. With only a few hundred dollars, a tape recorder, and a one-way ticket, Sarno journey deep into the rain forest to find the music that had so thoroughly possessed him. He encountered the Bayaka; a Congo River tribe that existed in almost perfect isolation.

There are moments in Song From the Forest where the documentary's core narrative comes close to inducing groans: A white American travels to a rainforest in central Africa and finds a people (in this case, the Bayaka pygmies) whose pure culture and simple life connect him with the best part of himself, revealing to him the superficiality of his own culture. The traveler is Louis Sarno, who has devoted himself to the Bayaka for over 25 years. He's married to a Bayaka woman, and they have a thirteen-year-old son, Samedi. Sarno's one-of-a-kind recordings of traditional Bayaka music document a culture that has already lost much to modernity, which pains him. Song is filled with great beauty and moments of everyday life that show that director Michael Obert ha...

The saga of Louis Sarno has never been a secret. In the 1980s, American writer and musicologist visited the remote Bayaka Pygmy clan in the Central African Republic to record their unique music; with time, he settled among them, married a member of the tribe and started a family. In 1993, he published a memoir of his experiences, followed by an album collecting the Bayaka's earthy acoustic melodies in 1996; in 2010, Lavina Currier's feature-length "Oka!" fictionalized Sarno's journey with Kris Marshall cast as an embellished version of Sarno. But the true record of his unique tale finally comes together in "Song From the Forest," documentarian Michael Obert's perceptive and utterly gorgeous look at Sarno's life today and his experience returning to his old haunts in New York. Through an elegant juxtaposition of jungle and city life, "Song From the Forest" (which takes its name from Sarno's book) not only shows what...

Read More: Gorgeous 'Song From the Forest' Tracks How Louis Sarno Joined a Pygmy Tribe, Started a Family and Returned to New York U.S. born ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno once heard a song on NPR radio that stuck with him. He followed this music to the Central African rain forest -- and never returned. Indiewire has the exclusive trailer for director Michael Obert's "Song From the Forest," which tracks Sarno's amazing journey from the rainforest, where he met a Bayaki tribe woman and had a child, and back to New York more than 20 years later.  "Song From the Forest" opens on April 10 in New York and April 17 in Los Angeles. Expansion to additional cities is to follow.

Obert Plays A Polyrhythmic Requiem of Cultural Sovereignty

Director Michael Obert’s Vpro Idfa Award winning, SXSW imported Song from the Forest meditatively chronicles the aloof livelihood of Louis Sarno, an American whose interest in the exotic musical stylings of the Central African Bayaka Pygmy tribes led him away from his disheartening city dwelling to a permanent life of hunting, gathering, ethnographic field recording and eventually, fatherhood, and in doing, the vibrant songs of celebration once captured in moments of profound communal exuberance begin to seem more like tragically transitional requiems mourning the loss of an irreplaceable culture on the outs. Sarno himself and the traditional ways of the Bayaka lifestyle are beginning to fade, his health and spirits waning as globalization encroaches upon the forest he’s called home for the last 25 years. Embraced by the native community as one of their own, he remains an alien interloper of sorts,...

The awards winners for the 26th Idfa were announced in Amsterdam on Friday night.

Song from the Forest by Germany’s Michael Obert won the main prize at Idfa (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) tonight (Nov 29).

The film won the Vpro Idfa Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, worth €12,500.

The film tells the story of American Louis Sarno, who has lived for 25 years with a tribe of Pygmies in the jungle of Central Africa and decides to take his son to the Us for the first time.

The Special Jury Award went to A Letter to Nelson Mandela by Khalo Matabane (South Africa / Germany), in which the filmmaker takes a critical look at Nelson Mandela, his status and role in the reforms that took place in South Africa in the 1990s.

Twin Sisters by Mona Friis Bertheussen won the BankGiro Loterij Idfa Audience Award.

The Russian collective Gogol’s Wives Productions won the Ntr Idfa Award for Best Mid-Length...

The film Oka! takes its title from the Pygmy word for “Listen!” and really, there is no word that better describes director Lavinia Currier’s portrait of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno. Here, he is named Larry Whitman, but the character and his exploits are based on Sarno’s memoir of twenty-five years spent studying the life and music of the Bayaka people of the Central African Republic.

During the film’s opening sequence, Whitman is cooped up in his New Jersey home, listening to the music of the Pygmies, which he claims to his ears is more lovely than Beethoven. Soon he learns that his liver is failing, and so with only a limited time left to finish his life’s task of recording every Pygmy instrument, he takes off once again to Africa. He sets out to achieve his final goal: to capture the sound of a horn called a molimo,...

Inspired by the real-life story of musicologist Louis Sarno, Kris Marshall plays Larry Whitman, an American archivist who has been recording and preserving the music of the Bayaka pygmies of Yandombe in the Central African Republic. Just as he is about to return home to raise fresh funds, he's told he's dying of a liver disease... and opts to stay in the land he loves.

The maiden edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival will be held from 1st – 4th November.The film festival is an initiative of the Dharanshala based filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam.

Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam run an independent film company and produce films mainly focusing on the subject of Tibet. Some of their films include, The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet’s Struggle for Freedom, The Thread of Karma, Dreaming Lhasa and Big Treasure Chest for Future Kids.

12 films to be screened at the festival are announced so far, more will be coming soon. Those lined-up are:

Miss Lovely

India. Directed by Ashim Ahluwalia. Two brothers, Vicky and Sonu Duggal, produce forbidden sex-horror films for India’s small-town picture houses in mid-1980s Bombay. Vicky is struggling to run the tabooed operation, while Sonu desires to produce a romantic film which he would call ‘Miss Lovely’.

The film...

Inspired by the real-life story of musicologist Louis Sarno, Kris Marshall plays Larry Whitman, an American archivist who has been recording and preserving the music of the Bayaka pygmies of Yandombe in the Central African Republic. Just as he is about to return home to raise fresh funds, he's told he's dying of a liver disease... and opts to stay in the land he loves.

Title: Oka! Director: Lavinia Currier Starring: Kris Marshall, Isaach de Bankole, Will Yun Lee On the surface, “Oka!” has a couple potential red flags that seemingly mark it as yet another tale of a white Westerner saving and/or bringing culture to the lives of black Africans. In reality, though, it’s about the inverse of that scenario, and director Lavinia Currier’s film sings with an unexpected humor and exuberance. Based on an unpublished memoir, “Last Thoughts Before Vanishing From the Face of the Earth,” by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno, this is a unique and fascinating tale of cultural connection, and the elemental nature of various human curiosities that bind us together. The antithesis...

The film Oka! takes its title from the Pygmy word for “Listen!” and really, there is no better fitting word to describe Lavinia Currier’s portrait of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno. Here, he is named Larry Whitman, but the character and his exploits are based on Sarno’s memoir of twenty-five years spent studying the life and music of the Bayaka people of the Central African Republic.

During the film’s opening sequence, Whitman is cooped up in his New Jersey home, listening to the music of the Pygmies, that he claim to his ears is more lovely than Beethoven. Soon he learns that his liver is failing, and so with only a limited time left to finish his life’s task of recording every Pygmy instrument, he takes off once again to Africa. He sets out to achieve his final goal: to capture the sound of a horn called a molimo,...

Directed by Lavinia Currier Starring

Kris Marshall, Isaach de Bankolé, Will Yun Lee & the Bayaka of Yandombe

Based on the memoir by Louis Sarno

(.Last Thoughts Before Vanishing from the Face of the Earth.)

New Release Date! October 28, 2011

Presented by Dada Films and required viewing, Lavinia Currier.s (The Passion in the Desert) breathtaking new film, Oka! is a fish-out-of-water tale of an ethnomusicologist from New Jersey who finds himself immersed in the colorful lives ofthe Bayake pygmies. Based on the memoir by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno, who has lived with the pygmies for over 20 years, Oka! transports audiences to the vast forest of the Central African Republic into the magical world of the Bayaka and lyrically captures their music, dance, humor and exuberance, as well as the harsh realities they endure.

The forest dwelling tribe of Bayaka pygmies is famed for its acute hearing (.Oka!. means .listen!. in their Akka...

Recently premiering at Telluride Film Festival, Oka Amerikee is a film based on the life of “ethno-musicologist” Louis Sarno who, for 25 years, lived among the Bayakan Pygmies in the African rain forest recording sounds. His book, Last Thoughts Before Vanishing from the Face of the Earth, was the model for the project.

Starring in the film are Kris Marshall, Isaach De Bankole, Peter Riegert and Haviland Morris.

Lavinia Currier wrote and directed the film. She’s best known for the controversial Passion In The Desert, a film released in 1998 based on a short story by Honore De Balzac.

Currently, the film is making rounds on the festival circuit. Below is the trailer for the film.