A European cameraman, who lives in Beijing and speaks fluent Chinese, travels to South China. His plans to interview a human rights activist and farmers suddenly come to a halt when propaganda officials stop him. The officials proudly tell him about their tight relationship with a forestry giant which plans to build a paper mill in the area. In the meantime the police arrest the human rights lawyer. The filmmaker gets caught into an absurd situation and is under surveillance for days.—Anonymous
It's the new China, launching green initiatives and opening doors for international press, until Western journalist tries to uncover the links between the Chinese government and a global paper corporation. He checks in at the Red Forest Hotel to interview local farmers and what follows is nothing less than a suspense thriller.
A Finnish news cameraman who has worked for 15 years in Beijing starts to document China's massive tree-planting campaigns. Faced with the threat of climate change, the economic giant China is strongly investing in recycling, renewable energy and other environmental reforms.The filmmaker wants to explore whether authoritarian China, with its effective new environmental policies, could set a green example for the world. But the project takes a surprise turn when the filmmaker gets stopped by local government officials on his way to film tree plantations in Guangxi province, southern China.
Here, huge eucalyptus plantations are being developed by the world's second largest forestry corporation, Stora Enso, largely owned by the Finnish state. The eucalyptus trees will produce raw material for a planned paper and pulp mill. The filmmaker ends up trapped in a Kafkaesque situation: the officials praise the project's benefits, but prevent him from approaching the plantations and interviewing locals. Instead he gets isolated in a local hotel, and finds out that all his contacts have been detained. A year later he makes another attempt to find out what is really going on in the province.
