In the video
Forest on Location, the audience descents into a replica of the last remains of primeval forest Bialowieza (at the outer border of the EU, between Poland and Belarus). In the film the avatar of the Iranian opera singer
Shahram Yazdani sings his Persian interpretation of
Nature Boy, the popular hit made famous by Nat King Cole.
Nature Boy was composed in 1948 by Eden Ahbez, a proto-hippie who lived barefoot under the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles, though its
melody was claimed by Herman Yablokoff, a Jewish Broadway composer from New York who grew up in the region of Bialowieza forest. In Yazdani’s version, a wise tree talks to the lost boy, as an antithesis to the often imperialist relationship
with nature in Western culture.
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