In this edition of The Confessional, director Noam Osband writes about the origins and production of his film A Thousand Pines, which he co-directed with Sebastián Díaz and is now streaming on PBS Passport and screening at film festivals.

I am often asked how I discovered the world of tree planting that I portray in my film. Thousand Pinesand the truth is that it has an unconventional backstory.

I became a filmmaker during my first year of graduate school and was working on a PhD in anthropology. Not long after starting that program, I had a bit of a crisis What the hell have I done?! Why did I decide to get a PhD? Although I enjoy reading complex academic texts, I have no interest in writing in an intentionally obscure style.

So I decided to take a film class in my second semester to see what it felt like as a storytelling tool. I should add that this isn’t entirely far removed from the world of anthropology, as visual anthropology and documentary storytelling have long been a subfield of that discipline.

I took a beginners film class… and fell in love with it. I never received any formal training in filmmaking and most of what I learned came from film courses in graduate school.

When it came time to choose a dissertation topic, I knew I wanted to research immigration to the United States, and I wanted to develop a research project that would take me back to Arkansas.

After studying at Teach for America, I taught high school in rural Arkansas and fell in love with the state. Even now, over twenty years later, I go back to visit almost every year. Both of my children are named after Arkansans. I thought I could study Latinx immigration to Arkansas, so I spent a summer in the Ozarks doing fieldwork and spending time with the Latinx community.

At the same time, I was also hanging out with old hippies who had come to the state with the back-to-the-land movement. They would often say to me, “You should look into planting trees. We used to do that, and now it’s only Latinos.” After a month, I realized that this was a great topic.

Even though the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer and producer of wood products, no one knows anything about this work or these workers. Additionally, there was a unique backstory of hippies turned business owners that we focus on in the film.

I had to convince the deans at the University of Pennsylvania to allow me to submit a film, but with the support of my supervisor and the dissertation committee, they agreed to a documentary dissertation.

Filming of “A Thousand Pines”

Most of the documentary was shot in 2013 and 2014, as I was traveling with the crew featured in the film for over half a year. I first met the plantation owners the night they left Tlaxiaco to come to the United States.

It was super intimidating. As a white guy with a video camera in rural Oaxaca, I stood out, and I think everyone was wondering: What is this guy doing? It helps that I didn’t know about the rumor that I worked for the CIA, otherwise I would have been even more intimidated!

Instead, in true anthropological fashion, I lived with those who did this work: I shared a hotel bed like everyone else and traveled to and from the construction site in a minibus. Only through this commitment did I have access to the private and often painful moments that characterize the lives of these plantation owners. It was a unique experience to be in the United States and have little contact with anyone outside of this crew, as the construction sites and hotels are so isolated.

Making this film was one of the most eye-opening journalistic experiences of my life. It’s one thing to read that someone is planting 5,000 trees a day; it’s quite another to see it with your own eyes and experience first-hand the impact that reforestation efforts have on people and families.

When I tell people about the work, they often can’t believe how difficult it is. They are also fascinated by the fact that they have never heard of tree planting or the reforestation industry and that they have probably driven past pine plantations countless times on the highway without ever noticing them.

I spent a few weeks planting with the crew, as anthropology is about participant observation. I originally planned to plant and film the whole season, but I didn’t get to film much and had to stop planting. After making that decision, I also had to find a way to endear myself to the crew so they wouldn’t hate me for giving up the same backbreaking work as them to make a film.

I decided the Aquadorthe water carrier, and during filming I would walk around with a backpack full of water bottles so I could give people a drink break. It was a great way to make friends.

Ultimately, I became the first student in the 300-year history of the University of Pennsylvania to submit a documentary film as a dissertation. I also wrote a small portion – about 40 pages – but that’s nothing compared to the amount of writing required for a normal dissertation.

The entire documentary was divided into four parts, looking at different tree planters in North America: Mexican migrant workers in the US, native Americans who still do this work, Canadians who plant in their home country, and an oral history with the owners of the companies that employ migrant workers. It was a three-hour film, or as I like to call it, the Lawrence of Arabia of dissertations.

It was intentionally an academic documentary. I put footnotes on the screen and told the film in an academic language that would be difficult for a general audience to understand.

However, I thought there should be a film about the Mexican tree planters that would appeal to a wider audience. It took me nearly a decade, but I finally put a team together, brought on board a fantastic co-director and co-producer in Sebastián Díaz, and secured funding from organizations like ITVS and Latino Public Broadcasting to make the film, which premiered last year.

In many ways, the film was a team effort that came about through editing. When I made the film, I was still early in my career and hadn’t given too much thought to the story and characters when I was shooting.

To make the film, we had to comb through the footage and try to find the right people for a character-driven documentary. We always knew that Raymundo Morales, the crew foreman who returns for his 20th season, would be a central character, but it was only after working with our editor that we came to the conclusion that two young plantation owners would be the other main characters. Eventually, we did an impromptu shoot in Oaxaca to get some B-roll footage and some more interviews to create the narrative structure that follows the crew over the course of a year.

Since spending that time with Raymundo and his crew, I’ve wanted to make a film that honors the sacrifices of the tree planters and this film is one way to do that. While it’s not the only goal of the film, I sincerely wanted to make a film that tree planters can show their children and show them the work they’ve been doing from home all these years.