Back in March, while at the South by Southwest festival to discuss data visualization with a NASA team, I had a chance to watch “Song from the Forest,” a deeply captivating visual and sonic exploration of the strange, music-driven life of Louis Sarno, an American ethnomusicologist who was lured to the Congo River basin in the 1980s by recordings of pygmy songs and, in many ways, never came back.

This trailer captures the feel of the film well:

The documentary, which has won awards and had a successful release in Europe, will have its New York City premiere Friday at 5 p.m. at the Bowtie Chelsea Cinemas, followed by a discussion with the director, Michael Obert, the music supervisor, David Rothenberg, and others.

I hope the screening helps the film garner sufficient attention to gain more of a foothold here.

The film’s allure lies both in the obsessive, yet humorous nature of its core character (in a way, Sarno somehow captures qualities of Groucho Marx and Kurtz, Marlon Brando’s character in “Apocalypse Now”) and the magnetic appeal of the Bayaka pygmy people, whose musicality drew him to the Congo River basin and held him there for much of his life, like some siren’s call. 

The cinematography and sound recording both have starring roles, as well. In the rain forest, there is no such thing as silence and every tiny insect twang and buzz is vividly reproduced — which is particularly appropriate in a film about a man who recorded 1,000 hours of pygmy music*, capturing sounds he fears will soon evaporate as a tide of modernism floods the furthest nooks of this world.

The appeal of that modernism is particularly wrenching for him when he takes his adolescent son, Samedi, to New York City and the boy is clearly as fascinated with the urban jungle as Sarno is with the Congo basin.

Here’s a brief chat I had with Michael Obert back in March:

Obert says he feels this is the prime issue in the film: “In a highly mobilized world, where is home?”

He adds: “This is also a story about how the world of the Bayaka pygmies is dramatically changing,” noting that much of the Congolese rain forest has fallen in the last 30 years. “You have poachers, you have the ivory mafia coming in, you have the bushmeat mafia. And these people entirely rely on the rain forest as the basis of their lives but also the base of their identity. You take the forest away, it’s over.”

For those who don’t have time to watch the video, here’s more on Sarno, and on how Obert, then a magazine writer, heard about this odd character and decided to seek him out — with the resulting encounter triggering his decision to shoot the film (his first):

Here is this man, who has heard a music on the radio. And he’s captivated by the music and he follows the music all the way from the West to the Congolese rain forest and he tracks this music down and finds the people that do this music and he never comes back. He’s guided by sound. He’s a listener. This is a movie about listening.

I was there in autumn, 2009, on an assignment for a German magazine on a different subject. I heard of this white man who was said to be living deep in the rain forest with hunter-gatherer pygmies for decades.

I said let’s find this man. I was guided by two Bayaka pygmies. We’re following this elephant trail for an hour or two. Suddenly the rain forest opens up. There’s a clearing. And it’s full of beehive huts and you have Bayaka pygmies streaming towards me from all sides and directions with their spears and sharpened teeth and facial tattoos, shouting, flies all over.

And all of a sudden the noise was magically cut off and the Bayaka opened up and there was this white guy coming out of the underbrush with a bare belly and a pygmy baby on either arm. He gave the pygmy babies away, he stood in front of me and crossed his arms and said, “What are you doing here?”

I grabbed his hand and we’re just standing there, holding hands, with 200 pygmies staring at us, that’s how everything started. This is now more than four years ago and he’s still a major factor in my life.

Footnotes and more background|

* There is a soundtrack available of music from the film and several remixes have been done by a few electronic musicians. David Rothenberg, the music supervisor, said all proceeds from both recordings will benefit the Bayaka Support Project.

A 2013 review in IndieWire by Eric Kohn nicely captures the feel and merits of the film.

A 2011 feature film, “Oka!,” also tells Sarno’s tale.