Credit: Courtesy Photo / Oscura Producciones
It wasn’t until she moved to Austin in the early 2000s that San Antonio native Lacey Pipkin realized films could stir empathy in viewers.
She began volunteering for Cine Las Americas, a film festival showcasing work made by and featuring Latino and Indigenous people from across the Americas.
One of the films she remembers seeing around that time was the 1978 documentary María Sabina by Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Echevarría. The movie tells the story of a poet and healer in Oaxaca who became well known throughout the world for her mushroom healing rituals.
“It was the film that showed me that you can take a totally different approach to subjects that are difficult to communicate,” Pipkin told the Current during a recent interview. “It has a direct legacy to Daughters of the Forest.”
Co-written by Pipkin, a 1997 graduate of Alamo Heights High School, the documentary, Daughters of the Forest, follows Indigenous mycologists who combine scientific training and ancestral knowledge to explore the vital relationship between mushrooms, their communities and the forests of Mexico.
Pipkin’s contribution to the film was writing the internal dialogue of the mushrooms found growing deep in the forests. “It can be hard to thrive,” a mushroom whispers in the film. “We wait for the right conditions. But sometimes we have to seek them out. Traveling far to unexpected places.”
During our interview, Pipkin, who now calls Fredericksburg home, talked about what it was like to write dialogue for mushrooms, how to avoid an apocalyptic tone when making a film about climate change and why she finds fungi so fascinating.
Daughters of the Forest screens at the locally organized Raza Cósmica Film Festival, which runs Thursday, Oct. 8 through Saturday, Oct. 10. Pipkin’s film will screen at Slab Cinema Arthouse at Blue Star on Friday, Oct. 9. She will do an audience Q&A after the film.
What does it take to write for a mushroom?
In the process of writing the voice of the mushroom – what we dared think the mushroom might say – we tried to bring it back to the essentials. When you’re trying to put words in the mouth of a being that doesn’t talk, you have to get past a lot of your own assumptions. You might want to make it sound poetic or use lyrical language, or you might want to project a lot of your own perceptions of the world. It was helpful to think about what we share with the mushroom rather than just try to impose your conscious or unconscious thoughts and beliefs on this other being.
Did you always consider the mushrooms their own characters in the film?
Yes. It was always meant to be an attempt to understand the relationship between humans and mushrooms, not just between the different humans in the story. We wanted to understand symbiosis – the coexistence and influence we exert on each other.
How did you approach writing a documentary that doesn’t follow a traditional template?
Well, [director] Otilia [Portillo Padua] found inspiration in the writing of [author] Ursula [K.] Le Guin, who wrote a lot of science fiction and speculative fiction. Using [Le Guin’s] Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction as a narrative device was essential to this film. Rather than thinking of the story as a linear hero’s journey, the film takes an approach that’s much more related to what someone is picking up along the journey of their life. The film jumps around between past and present and between different voices to create a collective experience.
The film deals with important topics like climate change, but it doesn’t feel like a conventional environmental documentary. How conscious were you of avoiding that?
I think it was a conscious decision to express an absolute urgency of the threats to both humans and the natural world but not be apocalyptic or fatalistic about it. This film draws attention to what we don’t know and recognizes where we’re making assumptions. It was an effort to portray the threats we face … without coming from a fearful perspective.
Do you look at mushrooms differently now?
Absolutely! After it rains, when I’m walking around, I might be lucky enough to wander into some undeveloped land out here and get to see the mushrooms at work. I feel a different kind of kinship to them now than I did prior to starting this project. Mushrooms are compelling because the life of that fruit can be so brief, and it only happens in the very right conditions.
What do you hope people who see this film walk away with?
I hope people come away with a sense of appreciation for the way we accompany each other in the world. And perhaps a deeper understanding that we all are exerting an effect on each other all the time as people and as beings that are alive. There is hope and responsibility in that.
Raza Cósmica: Daughters of the Forest
Free, 7 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 9, Slab Cinema Arthouse at Blue Star, 134 Blue Star, (210) 212-9373, slabcinemaarthouse.com.
More information on all the Raza Cósmica screening is available at the festival’s website.
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