The sap of our lives

Who will say the infinite wisdom of trees, their benevolence and their empathy when we take the trouble to listen to them? In the midst of a personal and professional crisis, Sandra decides to go green in the countryside and return for a summer to her family home, of which she has kept enchanted memories. If this reunion fills her with joy, she quickly realizes that this feeling is not shared: she comes up against a deaf hostility, even frankly declared, of the inhabitants of the village. Determined to understand why, the young woman goes back little by little to the peasant origins of her family, to her ancestor Elie, a contemporary of the French Revolution, who seems to send her, beyond the centuries, a sibylline message on the pruned trees. … Could the “faces” or the “tadpoles”, as the country tradition designates them, be the guardians of a forgotten path to wisdom? With delicacy and subtlety, Mary Aulne and Mathieu Bertrand reconnect with the wonder aroused by the powerful spectacle of nature. Through this touching story of family and transmission, they rehabilitate a know-how that has now been rediscovered: agroforestry. An intimate investigation between small and big history that goes back to the roots of an ancestral practice: agroforestry.