The credits for And Still the Seed, a Puerto Rican nature documentary short about deforestation and preservation, lists the plants in order of their appearance. This small gesture of visibility attests to the boundary-challenging circle of compassion held by the filmmakers. Very rarely do documentaries treat non-human life as worthy of an end-credit title, which itself signals a contribution to the film, but it’s fitting for director Llaima S. Sanfiorenzo’s admirable short.

When selecting the subject of a nature documentary, one could hardly pick a less naturally energizing topic than plants. They don’t do much! But that’s kind of the point of And Still the Seed. We watch as two women, Gabriela Collazo Cáceres and Leidy Vázquez Santos, with jobs to protect the genetic history of Puerto Rican trees delicately tend to their seeds. The essentially photographic close-ups on the plants approach a quiet meditative space.

The frequent close-ups on the two women’s hands connect human labour to the plant lives, while also implicitly connecting our lives to theirs (something the film makes even more explicit with all of the mentions of chocolate and coffee plants). It also helps that many of the plants are beautiful. This sweet short turns a traditionally boring subject lacking both movement and the potential for violence into a compelling environmentalist stance.

Sanfiorenzo skilfully connects the destruction of Puerto Rican greenery with colonialism and colonialism’s economic cousin, capitalism, and it stands apart from its National Geographic peers because of it. The latter has become a commonplace punching bag in nature documentaries, and rightfully so, but the former has been almost entirely ignored; the interconnectedness of the people, the land, and the non-human life has been traditionally superseded by the narrative convenience of the colonial storytellers.

The connection to Spanish colonialism comes largely through a puppet performance, itself an artistic relic of the occupying culture, and arguably through the imagined perspective of a 600 year tree. By beginning with the baffling tree voice, Sanfiorenzo gives voice to the voiceless — a decidedly anti-colonial creative choice. The talking tree reminded me of the African proverb, “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter”. Instead of teaching a lion to write, Sanfiorenzo makes a tree talk.

And Still The Seed premieres at the Atlanta Film Festival.