Vertigo Garden

It sounds like a strange, even made-up story: in a botanical garden in China’s Jiangxi province, the perfectly preserved body of its founder is discovered 57 years after his disappearance, beneath a layer of rocks and snow. His brain is also exceptionally well preserved, and scientists decide to reconstruct his memories using artificial intelligence and release them into the digital realm.

How do you bring such an experiment to the screen? This exquisite blend of archival footage, manipulated film material, and cultural references celebrates the Lushan Botanic Garden and the botanist life’s work. He believed the only film capable of capturing the bizarre concept of memory was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo. His own investigation in this area involved using the roots of a dawn redwood, a “living fossil” tree species, to connect with the planet’s memories.