At the heart of this artistic ode to the commons is the 1993 campaign to save a sweet horse chestnut tree in George Green, Wanstead.
This film tells a collective social history of the UK tradition of the commons—land collectively owned and used to gather, play, and debate. The film centres around the George Green treehouse in East London. In the early 1990s, when the old sweet chestnut tree that housed the treehouse was threatened, people across the world wrote letters to the treehouse as part of a campaign to save it. From this story, the film expands inward to the artit’s recollections of the protests and outward through archival materials from other social collective sites: Diggers of the 17th century, radical summer camps in Upstate New York in the 1930s and 40s, anti-war protests of Greenham Common in the 1980s, squatting communities of road protest camps in the 1990s, and the outdoor raves of the 2000s.
CONTENT NOTES: Discussion of eviction.
ACCESS NOTES: Mix of spoken and visual storytelling. Occasional non-storytelling on-screen text. Occasional overlapping dialogue.
Screening as part of #TOAFF25
