Bright Forests: A First Contact Sci-Fi About Systems on Earth

Chadwick Harman’s Bright Forests is a philosophical and emotional sci-fi short about humankind’s eternal reach towards the unknown. Following a decades-long effort to make contact with extraterrestrial life, the film centres itself around Natalie Isaacs’ perspective, the latest in a line of scientists who have shared that dream.   

The film opens with a lofty monologue that informs the film’s structure to come, dividing it into three chapters: “To Search”, “To Reach”, “To Hope” (and a final sigh, “To Wait”). It takes light years for a message to reach one-way. The obvious tragedy of which is that a human sender will have worn out his lifetime before they can become the receiver. Like Natalie (Victoria Kelleher), her predecessor, her father Christopher (Jeffrey Larson) has spent years pondering and prodding his predecessor’s work. When finally, a reply reaches him, he is in the peculiar position of enjoying the fruits of someone else’s labour, being crowned victor of someone else’s battle. This conflicting position is best figured in Natalie, who grapples with the same and more, being a woman and the child of the great Christopher Isaacs. 

The trick of the film is that the great mcguffin of alien contact allows it to consider the peripherals like legend or even the mundane day-to-day-ness of the work. What becomes of the magnificence of life when you face budget cuts? By the opinion of the administrators and executives, an inefficient use of resources. (To be sure, technocracy’s favoured child, space research is not where the harshest budget cuts are happening right now, but a film is a great way to make a point.)

The cinematography works to give a sense of the scale of the story. We are, after all, dealing with decades of human effort, and centuries of dreaming—it is why the opening monologue touches on Plato’s cave, storytelling, and human nature itself. Wild west imagery thus combines with rows upon rows of satellites (there is a presence of Jordan Peele’s Nope in there) which then shifts to the humble, unspectacular, beautiful root of it all: a thinking person with a pen and paper. 

Watching Bright Forests within the context of worsening life on earth brings with it the temptation of cynicism, but to give in would be as if to erase the distance between James Cameron and Oceangate. It is why, while writing this, this author is choosing to focus on the hope and the dream within the film. Alien or no alien, it is heartbreakingly human to look up and search the skies, and hope we are not alone in this.