Martin Scorsese has signed on as an executive producer of Trees Are Watching, the psychological horror film from Iranian Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi that holds its world premiere today at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Trees Are Watching stars Eva Green as Darya, a writer who returns to her hometown of Mardin with her deaf daughter, only to find the visit curdling into something else entirely. The family’s old house sits on land stripped bare by deforestation, and Darya begins receiving nightly visitations from a malevolent presence that takes the shape of a wooden chair — a haunting knotted up with her unresolved history with twin sisters Spin and Nihal. Green is best known to genre audiences for Penny Dreadful‘s Vanessa Ives and turns in Dark Shadows and Nocebo.
Ghobadi, whose filmography has mostly lived in folklore-steeped drama — including the Camera d’Or winner A Time for Drunken Horses — rather than outright horror, has framed the project as intensely personal. In materials distributed ahead of the Toronto screening, he called the festival “a singular place in my journey as a filmmaker” and said the story drew, in part, from the nightmares that have haunted his eighteen years of exile. Green has described the film to press as a “modern ecological fable,” casting its timber spectre less as a jump-scare device than as a stand-in for a natural world pushed past its breaking point.
“A modern ecological fable.”
Eva Green, on Trees Are Watching
Scorsese’s executive producer credit sits alongside Lucas Akoskin and Bahoz Nasradin; Seyfi Sahin, Ghobadi, Lydia Dean Pilcher and Golriz Ehtiati produce. The film comes from MIJ Film and is being presented by Open the Door. No North American distributor has picked it up yet, so whether — and when — audiences beyond the festival circuit get a look at Trees Are Watching remains an open question.
The film screens today at TIFF Lightbox. A couple of trailers are circulating online, but none carry a confirmed official distributor or studio channel credit, so we’re holding off on embedding one until that’s sorted out.
