Coming from different backgrounds, countries and with different motors of motivation the three directors found eachother to make the documentary ‘WOOD’.
There was Monica’s urge to speak out about the huge Romanian forest problem, about poor transilvanian farmers who do whatever they can to make a living in this transitional period after the fall of the communist regime. The fact that the main motor in this disaster were mainly Austrian companies which grabbed the opportunities of cheap land and a corrupt bureaucracy to establish a kind of WILD EAST CAPITALISM was Ebba’s motivation to participate in developing WOOD. It indeed was a handful of Austrian companies who actually fuelled the extent of the clear cuttings by paying better prices after having built huge saw mills for processing immense quantities of wood. Ebba and Michaela met during the production of a different documentary project. After having done the short film about Sasha von Bismarck, who went undercover before to reveal forest crimes, Michaela felt that his work should be shared with a wider audience. We all believed that Sasha and his NGO would have the potential to interfere in this mess and to provoke political change in Romania. We described the situation to them. They were interested and got involved. That’s how our film began.