Windlins

The definition of what constitutes a forest is complicated. This film attempts to imagine the idea of the forest for Shetland, a place where the landscape is treeless. It considers the forest as an idea, an experience of loss and renewal, a metaphor, and an image, as in a large number of vertical or tangled objects, such as a forest of sails and masts carried by fishing boats once visible around Shetland’s natural harbours or the dense mass of the newly constructed forest of 103 wind turbines looming over Shetland’s north-central mainland today. It is an invitation to look, to see, to listen and to hear, to discover the world around us, to retrieve knowledge and culture lost with the disappearance of forests in Scotland and Shetland, to better understand the forest and to learn how to overcome a fear of the forest and be able to be within it. The duality of loss and renewal is embedded in the word ‘windling’ or ‘windlin’ in the Shetlaen language. It is a bundle of grasses, a sign of both end and beginning, of hope and renewal, as the hay has been harvested and then secured in a bundle for positive, productive use. In dialect, however, it can also mean something that is torn off by the wind.