“The film is at its strongest when, like a good researcher, it approaches one question only to uncover another”

In a small conversation with Friedrich, a family friend, after returning home to attend her grandmother’s funeral, Frieda (Julia Windischbauer) mentions that sometimes she wishes she were not her mother’s daughter. Not because the two of them seem unable to see eye to eye, nor because their relationship is particularly troubled, but because she wishes she could understand her mother better. After all, maintaining a proper distance from one’s object of study is a crucial step in scientific research, one that depends deeply on the ability to preserve an objective and analytical perspective, something Frieda, herself a PhD candidate, should be familiar with. Yet, much like the doctoral research that forms part of her character’s background, Katharina Rabl’s Memories of a Forest (Erinnerungen eines Waldes) suggests that the most difficult part of such work is mitigating observer bias, and that, unfortunately, this may be impossible.

It is precisely this process of mitigation, this search for a distance that might allow for a structured and layered analysis, that lies at the core of Memories of a Forest. It also triggers Frieda’s every interaction with her family, her friends, and her surroundings. From the moment of her arrival, when she discovers that her father is recovering from back surgery she was not even aware of, to the absurdity of inheriting a small forest that was largely planted and maintained by her grandmother, and the ensuing need to locate documents proving ownership of the land, Frieda is constantly reminded that she does not possess enough information to properly assess either her situation or that of her family.

Perhaps worse, she gradually realizes that she never bothered to ask them the necessary questions, a cornerstone of any academic inquiry, regardless of the field. She has been living a life of almost complete detachment, seemingly untouched by whatever happens back home. The irony is that the distance she has cultivated in order to observe the world objectively has also prevented her from seeing what is closest to her.

Within this context, a crucial moment in the film’s constant movement between noticing a problem, recognizing a pattern, and attempting to act upon it comes when Frieda discovers her parents’ financial difficulties. What reveals the extent of their situation is her deceased mother’s wish to be buried in a separate burial ground rather than the one used by the rest of the family, an expense they cannot afford. Frieda, now the owner of a piece of land, decides to cut down some of her trees and sell the wood to pay for the funeral while she takes some time to decide what to do with the forest.

What is interesting here is that no problem emerges in isolation from its context. Everything is deeply connected and intertwined with the lives of each member of her family. This seems to be the film’s central thesis: that no one lives in isolation, but rather in relation to others; that, like a forest, we are all connected through systems whose roots and consequences extend far beyond what can immediately be seen. The question, then, is where Frieda can go from here.

That realization leads to another discovery: most of the trees in her inherited forest are sick and infected. Her mother had always trusted Friedrich to help her grandmother care for the land, and, like Frieda herself, she had been able to look away from the forest, trusting that it would simply continue to exist. In Rabl’s film the characters are perpetually either too close to or too far away from what they should be dealing with, a distance that in academic discourse can profoundly affect the results of an investigation. They either contaminate what is being studied or fail to collect enough data.

Rabl reinforces this idea through a persistent dual structure in her narrative. Things are almost always seen in relation to their counterpart: mother and daughter, life and death, academic and manual labor, connection and isolation, proximity and distance. More importantly, the film’s strongest moments emerge precisely from the way this duality is constructed without allowing itself to collapse into an “either/or” resolution. Every choice produces different consequences, different possibilities, and different regrets. There is no definitive answer, only the certainty of new questions.

Unfortunately, this complexity is somewhat undermined by the third act’s attempt, through a series of old letters, to offer a single explanation for the existence of the forest and the complicated relationship between the women who have inhabited its history. The film is at its strongest when, like a good researcher, it approaches one question only to uncover another. By contrast, its impulse toward explanation feels less convincing than its earlier, and better, commitment to uncertainty.

By the end of the film Frieda has moved further and further away from her academic life. Unsure about her professional future and unable to submit the final version of her thesis on time, she slowly replaces research with manual labor, becoming increasingly invested in her family’s past and troubled present. Yet this is another exercise in duality: one form of work replaces another, but neither offers fulfillment. Working the land brings its own frustrations, just as academic work had been a source of stress. They are simply two possible manifestations of the activity we call work.

As Frieda moves deeper into the inherited forest, searching for contaminated wood to cut down and healthy wood to sell, she also moves deeper into her family’s memories and ghosts. She finds herself trapped in a cycle of repeated patterns. Like the forest, her family may be composed of different individuals, but they are rooted in the same land, and the contamination of one affects all the others.

Grandmother, mother, and daughter: three branches of a larger family tree, each attempting to exist as an individual while remaining inseparable from the soil that produced them. It is not so different from Frieda’s research. After all, every researcher is shaped by the traditions, histories, and accumulated weight of the scholarship within which they work, no matter how original their subject may appear.

Thus, in Memories of a Forest, the forest ultimately becomes more than inherited property. It is an archive, a body, a family tree, and a methodological problem. To study it is to confront the impossibility of standing entirely outside what one wishes to understand. Frieda searches for the distance necessary to make sense of her family, only to discover that some things cannot be understood from afar, and some forests can only be entered.