The Smoldering Forest: A People Powered Cinema
Meet Sita—space-larva, seed, sentient forest, cyborg goddess, biohacker, shaman, and daughter of the earth—who returns in a time of upheaval to re-imagine the stories that shape how we see and move through the world.
Retold in the voice of its female protagonist Sita, this retelling transforms the South Asian epic Ramayana into a series of eco-tales at the edge of the sixth extinction, blending mythology, ecology, and science-fiction into an immersive cinematic experience. Originally imagined as a film, the project had intended to engage human-powered energy solutions to produce the film. However, since the most environmentally-friendly film is one that never gets made, the project now exists as a performance of the cinematic.
Participants pass images and objects hand-to-hand, experience a live soundtrack performed by Vaidya, and take part in a guided visualization—co-creating the cinema together through imagination. By transforming the cinematic form, the performance asks us to re-imagine the digital as handmade – of the digits – rather than the sensorially impoverished versions of the digital being pushed on us today. It is an invitation to remember that storytelling technologies are meant to bring us into community, rather than isolating and dividing us. If we had used a projector, we would all be facing the screen; instead, now we are in a circle, facing each other.
The work has been presented at venues including the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York City), the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), and international festivals and conferences in India and beyond. It is being presented here as part of I-House Davis’ Roots & Routes series, exploring diaspora, identity, and belonging.
