The Tree
2018 · 7m · Francia
Directed by Basil Malek, Han Yang
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
In a world of drought, an old man spends days collecting drops of water to quench the thirst of a dead tree. The effort recalls past times and the motive behind tireless persistence.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a parable wrapped in a parable—the premise sounds like grief-stricken genre fantasy, but Malek and Yang strip it down to pure ritual, making the dead tree feel less like metaphor and more like a genuine refusal to accept the world's verdict; that stubborn inversion of 'pointless' into 'necessary' is the only kind of experimental move worth making.
The film locates itself squarely in the lineage of Bresson and late Tarkovsky—patient, essentialist cinema where duration and repetition become form—and the formal restraint (the economy of gesture, the editing's refusal to accelerate) demonstrates a directing consciousness fully aware of what it's inheriting and how to honor it.
The entire film pivots on a single sustained choice: to photograph the water drops themselves—their weight, their catch of light—with such visual specificity that an act of futility becomes an act of witnessing, and suddenly the old man's persistence isn't sentimental but almost scientific in its devotion.