Falling (2017) is a short experimental film which expresses, through poetry, the relationship between man and nature, particularly mankind’s impact on the environment – never-ending exploitation, leaving the world bare. The 1970s archive footage, which hails the ingenuity and benefits of industrial agriculture, lays exposed and ruined like its consequences. Salvaged archive footage from Congo’s national archives is reinterpreted through Giovanni Pascoli’s poem, The Fallen Oak (1907). The poem describes labourers intent on their goal of chopping down an oak tree for firewood, who are, at first, oblivious of the consequences, and then unwilling to change their minds until it is too late. Through her PhD research project, the film’s director is involved in the digitisation of documentaries from the National Film Archives of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where much of the filmmaking in the 1970s was dedicated to modernisation, particularly the national development of industrial crop harvesting and other agricultural processes. The original footage comprises 16mm films that have suffered over forty years of a tropical climate and intermittent storage, turning the film into atmospheric archaeological media records.