When tree surgeon Laura discovers her twin sister’s commemorative oak is dying, she returns to their childhood home seeking the threads of connection. Here she must repair broken bonds with her estranged brother Joe before she can say goodbye to Eloise. The Arborist is a story about how painful, difficult and necessary it is to accept the death of a loved one – how grief stays with us and can reawaken. At these times, how do we learn to live with it again?

Director’s Vision

I wrote and directed The Arborist to make sense of an old grief – to explore the healing role that objects, shared stories and memories play and to make the terrible irreversibility of death somehow bearable. I wanted to invite audiences into this most intimate, devastatingly human experience, creating a sensory cinematic world through colour, light, score, sound design and visually expressive storytelling that evokes a meditative pace and mood. Despite the tragedy at its core, my hope is that audiences feel emotionally and visually rewarded by watching The Arborist.