The lone white man standing barefoot in the Mombongo river in the Central African Republic while listening to the exotic sounds of the rainforest isn’t a documentary filmmaker for WWF or BBC. Louis Sardo has been living among the Bayaka pygmy clan for three decades; he speaks the language, married a local woman and has a son. Yet as a white man he is always viewed as a visitor by his adopted community. The documentary SONG FROM THE FOREST is about Sardo’s journey. In the mid-1970s the young US-American ethnomusicologist travelled to the Central African Republic not only to record the unique music of the Bayaka, of which he now has hundreds of hours, but also to escape the constraints of western society. What became a curse for the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau during his two-year stint in isolation in the woods of Massachusetts, was a blessing for Sardo: a solitary life amidst nature. The travel journalist Michael Obert accompanies Sardo during his daily routine in the Bayaka village and on his trip to New York with his 13-year-old son. Obert is able to deftly capture the clash of two cultures in his interviews with Sardo. Sardo is also a stranger, a guest in this technocratic world.
SONG FROM THE FOREST is not your classic documentary and far from an ethnographic study of the Bayaka – most impressive in Obert’s film is when there are no words, just images and sounds: when Sardo hears the music of the Bayaka in the streets of New York and then can’t get the clamor of the metropolis out of his ears once he is back in Africa, no words are necessary to make clear the contrast between the rainforest and urban America or his existence between two cultures.

David Herger