One of the more bizarre documentaries, winner of Best Documentary Feature at the Warsaw International Film Festival, Fuck For Forest probably sits in the category of films where the audience cannot help but ask – what just happened?
Brought to life by relative newcomer Michal Marczak, the film follows one of the worlds strangest charities Fuck For Forest. Its motto – sex can save the world – with an environmental cause (albeit a broad one – to save the world) at its heart, this NGO raises money by selling erotic videos and nude photographs on its site with the long term goal to buy a piece of land from the poor villages along the Amazon and provide its inhabitants with help and sustainability.
The film loosely follows Danny in the first instance, an eccentric twenty something who has left his repressed home in Norway to build a much 
more psychedelic life in Berlin as part of this cause. He meets Tommy, Leona and Natty who are all from different walks of life but share the common factor of having troubled backgrounds and find some solace in each others company, ideology and sexual habits. Together they live like the naked Lost Boys refusing to grow up and fighting a cause, which in reality comes secondary to their hedonistic lifestyles.
One has to follow this film as a documentary – the truth of whether or not this actually is fact over fiction is not apparent – but its structure organically lets the action unfold, rather than relying on any form of through line. Because of this, one spends the majority of the film wondering where it is going – and only in its final chapter, where these “penniless” activists manage to bag a flight to South America – do you find out that this cause isn’t just a front for an ‘accepted’ porn site, but these kids really do have a little bit of heart about them – its just a shame that it firstly took so long to see it and it’s ultimately rejected by those who they’re campaigning so tirelessly and naively for.
What is very interesting, is that this film opens its audience up to a much broader way of thinking about charity work. These characters live in self designated squalor so that they can save absolutely every penny for their cause, and incorporate their free love ideology with liberation and nature. So far (apparently) Fuck For Forest has raised around 400,000 Euros and although their methods in raising this small fortune is anything but conventional they never protest that it’s for anything other than the good of the land that they seek to cultivate and save.
Whether or not you’ll like this film falls upon a very fine line – Its slow moving, with no real narrative to follow and there are some quite graphic scenes of a sexual nature which make it in parts a difficult watch. However, at the centre of the film there are characters that you feel need direction, guidance and even charity themselves as they seem as lost as their cause.
Fuck For Forest goes on release on the 19th April 2013
2 Stars
Fanatical about Film in a Perfect Way... 