Ever Since We Crawled Out

Ever Since We Crawled Out confronts the tumultuous relationship between humans and the finite resources the planet has to offer. Using black-and-white found-footage from film archives, the film highlights this topic through an endless montage of countless trees being chopped down, one after another after another—lingering on the climactic seconds before the trees succumb to gravity and meet their end on the ground. Creaking and moaning as they resist their fate, we are shown a process which we benefit from every day but rarely think of the difficult process which yields our conveniences. As the crack widens almost like mouth of a gluttonous figure preparing to consume something large, you can see the age lines of the tree, the time line of an individual which makes up an environment rapidly being destroyed, presumably for the sake of enterprise and commerce, either to be turned into pulp or to merely clear the valuable land. Once one tree starts falling, they all tumble like dominos. People only appear in a handful of shots—running, afraid to be confronted with the reality of their actions. After the trees fall, take a moment to settle, stray leaves falling down after it, an eerie silence only disturbed by the sound of wind rushing through the remaining trees which will be the next to go.