Name: Holy Wood Dust
Director: Victor Kossakovsky
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 105 min

Victor Kossakovsky has spent the last decade building a cinema of elements. He filmed water as a force of terrifying weight in Aquarela, gave a farm animal the gravity of a tragic heroine in Gunda, and made stone and ruin the subject of Architecton, before the more abstract Trillion. Each film trades narration for scale, the microscopic set against the monumental, and asks the audience to look until looking becomes thinking. With Holy Wood Dust, the Russian-born documentarist turns that method on trees, and on one very specific, very human ritual: the Christmas tree.

The film starts from a question that sounds like a koan and is treated as an experiment: what happens to a stump in the second after its tree is felled, and what might that tree register at that moment? Kossakovsky wrote the film with Stefano Mancuso, the University of Florence botanist and pioneer of plant neurobiology, whose research presents plants as living beings that perceive, choose, learn and remember. Under the microscope and in slow motion, the press notes promise, the answers surface as tiny reactions to injury, filigree currents of water and a signalling network that sits below everyday perception.

The spine is a journey. Holy Wood Dust follows millions of Christmas trees from the nursery forest to the felling, the selection, the transport and, finally, the throw from the window once the holidays end. Reviewing the world premiere, Screen Daily’s Jonathan Romney singled out a long sequence that tracks a huge evergreen through Italian mountain tunnels and along motorways to Rome, where it becomes the Vatican Christmas tree, and a brief one in which discarded trees end up as playthings for orangutans and elephants at a zoo.

The Holy Wood Dust film delegation at the Venice Film Festival photocall in front of the festival backdrop — The Holy Wood Dust delegation at the 83rd Venice Film Festival photocall. Photo: Jacopo Salvi, Archivio Storico La Biennale di Venezia, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Form carries the argument, as it always does with Kossakovsky. In the release announcing the German launch, the film’s press office stresses that he relies on staging rather than conventional explanation, building an immersive soundscape from natural noise, movement and silence. Gianmarco Donaggio shot the film, Ainara Vera edited it and Adrián Berenguer wrote the score. Not everyone was persuaded in Venice: Romney admired its beauty and technical mastery but found the approach more rhetorical than the revelatory best of Kossakovsky’s work.

Holy Wood Dust had its world premiere out of competition, in the Venice Open section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. Its German premiere now comes at DOK Leipzig, with Kossakovsky attending three screenings: on Thursday 29 October at 17:00 at the Schaubühne Lindenfels, on Friday 30 October at 20:30 at CineStar 4, and on Sunday 1 November at 17:00 at the Passage Kinos Astoria. The film also travels to the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, the Viennale in Vienna and IDFA in Amsterdam.

The 105-minute documentary is an Italian, Spanish and German co-production from Be Water Film and Solaria Film with Rai Cinema, Oceanika, Allegra Films and Hamburg’s Doppelplusultra Filmproduktion. It opens in German cinemas through mindjazz pictures on 3 December 2026 as Holy Wood Dust – Das Leben der heiligen Bäume, just as the country’s tree lots fill up with the very firs the film has been watching fall.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, Christmas trees, DOK Leipzig, Holy Wood Dust, mindjazz pictures, Stefano Mancuso