‘A Thousand Pines’ Review – A Retrospective

A Thousand Pines begins and ends with the person, the worker, often a migrant, and their bag of 5000 pine tree seedlings. For two and a half seasons, they travel across the continental United States to replace trees cut down to provide lumber. Unlike documentaries of the more exposé or visual essay style, the work of Noam Osband and Sebastian Diaz Aguirre presents the circumstances of this work as plainly as possible. From October to July, this team of Mexican workers plants throughout the southeast, and we follow them from hotel to motel, through rain, snow, and heat, and draw our own conclusions as their interviews are interspersed with family members, archival footage, and corporate representatives  

Our central figure is Raymundo Morales, a mid-50s project manager and foreman for a 15-person crew. He’s worked in this field for nineteen years, against the wishes of his father and mother, and it’s provided him with a comfortable life in Oaxaca, Mexico. He owns his house and truck, and he takes care of his wife and three children. But the work he’s brought cousins and uncles and friends into is notorious for taking away some of what it gives. Seedling planters were often eco-friendly liberals and hippies in the 60s and 70s, but now the work has grown amidst competition and desire for economic growth, meaning the person at the top is an unknown suit and ticker acronym while the average worker is foreign-born and operating with an H2B Visa. 

In the midst of the workers trekking through the countryside, watershed areas, and briar patches, additional interviews are intercut with the field experience. Through a blend of talking heads, archival footage, and still photography, A Thousand Pines includes a reflective period for the people responsible for the tree planting boom in the Vietnam era. These founders and executives were once countercultural and advocates. While most documentaries would resort to displaying that an interview subject was unavailable for comment or couldn’t be reached, these people share their side of the story. The film avoids glossing over their time as merely nostalgia or even excusing their behavior, and honestly, the film doesn’t need to undercut these men. They indirectly attack one another with snide comments and implications such as ‘I thought we were in this to save the Earth.’

A minor moment the film stays with, while avoiding glamorization, is the care and healing the men go through. They share phone cards so everyone can call home. They check one another for ticks after long days in brush, apply salve and massage muscles to relieve knots, and share home-cooked meals when prepackaged food doesn’t hit the spot. Sometimes, the hands of a friend and coworker are the only way to remove a pesky splitter or briar. During one unfortunate incident, they even share room and board with an entirely separate team when a hotel runs out of space. These men are sacrificing comfort and time in order to have an opportunity at an improved lot in life. Yet they only spend a third of the year at home on the foundations they’re providing for their families.

A Thousand Pines is more interested in labor, circumstances, and sacrifice, as opposed to who’s wrong or right and why. The film merely displays two points on a spectrum and avoids as much facade as possible. All so the viewer can make the decision for themselves on who’s taking advantage of whom. This award-winning documentary, currently streaming on PBS Passport for the remainder of 2026, deserves space and attention. These are the voices often ignored, though the laws and legislation of the U.S. determine their future.