Beyond the Trees Documentary: Film Festival Success

Looking Back

In April last year, I wrote about being behind the scenes during the making of a new documentary, Beyond the Trees, a film that tells the story of the van Eck Forests in northern California and Oregon. I started by saying that the film was soon to “hit the big screens at a number of film festivals” and ended by saying, “I believe Beyond the Trees achieves everything we set out to accomplish.” I still believe this. And so do others, it appears. We hit those film festival screens in a pretty big way!

Film Festival Success

At the time of writing in January 2024, the film’s latest success is its nomination for the Best of the Festival Award at the Paramount Film Festival Los Angeles. Our friends and colleagues at Imaginary Forces (IF) will be there on Saturday, 24 February, to see if we have won an award.

This nomination is just the latest in a line of awards and recognition we’ve been honored to receive over the last year since my colleague, Naomi Zimmermann, started assiduously entering us in select film festivals here in the U.S.

The Paramount Film Festival aside, these are the laurels we have won:

Private Screenings

Whilst the festivals have been busy screening Beyond the Trees, so too have we. Pacific Forest Trust (PFT) kicked off our screenings in May last year in San Francisco in a cool and well-known café and event space called Manny’s in the Mission. As with subsequent screenings mentioned below, there was a Q&A session with Laurie Wayburn (President of PFT), Anthony Gibbs (the film’s director from IF) and me. The film was greeted warmly and appreciatively, many questions were answered and, overall, a great time was had by all. This seems to have been the story ever since.

Amongst other screenings, IF (and IMAX) hosted a wonderful showing of the film at the private movie theatre at IMAX’s headquarters in Playa Vista in Los Angeles. Although not shot in IMAX format, the film was truly breathtaking on the big screen with superb quality, as testimony to IF’s work (as if we needed it). There were absolutely no pixilation issues, even with the screen being so huge. The film further made its way around California in September when it was shown at Future Proof Festival, a wealth management conference, in Huntington Beach. In October, on our home turf in New York, we at VanEck hosted our own screening, on a much smaller screen, at a venue down in Chelsea.

Chip Houghton (IF), Anthony Gibbs (IF), Laurie Wayburn (PFT), and Tom Butcher (VanEck) answer questions following a screening in San Francisco, CA, in May 2023.

Jan van Eck (VanEck), Tom Butcher (VanEck), and Laurie Wayburn (PFT) host a Q&A at Future Proof Festival in Huntington Beach, CA, in September 2023.

Anthony Gibbs (IF), Laurie Wayburn (PFT), and Tom Butcher (VanEck) at the documentary screening in New York, NY, in October 2023.

Upcoming Event: London, March 2024

For anyone who may be in London in March and can make it, Economist Impact is hosting its 9th annual Sustainability Week from Monday, 4 March, to Wednesday, 6 March. On Wednesday afternoon, we will be closing the three-day event at its final plenary session with both a screening of Beyond the Trees and a short Q&A session. Laurie, Anthony and I will all be there. So, see if you can make it too!

Going Forward

Whilst we continue to submit Beyond the Trees to relevant documentary film festivals, we are also looking at providing it publicly on or soon after Earth Day on 22 April 2024.

The trailer of Beyond the Trees can be found here.