“Trees do most of the things you do, just more slowly,” begins a New York Times review of Richard Powers’s 2018 labyrinthine novel The Overstory. The book uses a cast of characters’ intertwined lives as a means to tell the story of trees. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Soon after, a few producers at HBO wondered if its tangled story might translate into a documentary.

Barbara Kingsolver, who wrote the review, couldn’t help Googling whether Powers’s characters were real. They’re not, but when HBO brought the idea to Portland documentary filmmaker Irene Taylor, she was confident real-life counterparts existed. “He made this up,” she says. “It’s brilliant, right? But I was like, ‘This. Is. Life.’ Like, this will exist out there, we just have to go find it.”

What manifested, four years later, is Trees and Other Entanglements. The film, screening at PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater December 14 and streaming on MAX starting December 12, doesn’t follow the book’s plot in an explicit way, but borrows from its thematic overtones. The people Taylor found range spectacularly, from Tacoma lumber scion George Weyerhaeuser Sr. to American bonsai artist Ryan Neil to Beth Moon, a globetrotting photographer who specializes in palladium printed tree portraits; some of their lives are tangibly “entangled,” and some abstractly. “People are connected to trees for deeply personal reasons,” says Taylor.

Entanglements is Taylor’s 13th film. Her 2007 debut Hear and Now, about her deaf parents’ decision to get cochlear implants at age 60, won a Peabody Award and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Her Emmy-nominated 2020 film Moonlight Sonata was similarly personal, following her adolescent son, who is also deaf, as he learned to play the famously challenging Beethoven piece on the piano. (Taylor herself is hearing.)

In Entanglements, Taylor becomes one of the main characters. She’s in a battle with invasive ivy; it’s strangling Portland’s trees, and she’s one of many Portlanders working to cut it back. Soon this fight becomes a direct action Taylor can take to prolong a life, while she watches a family member battle a health condition.

Contrary to current documentary fashions, Taylor’s film is not a true-crime movie, nor a climate change film—though it does carry elements of both. There is a sense that you’re waiting for the shoe to drop, for the call to activism, but Taylor, who describes herself as “not a soapbox person,” opts to let viewers take their own messages from the film. In a reverse of Powers’s use of people to tell trees’ stories, Taylor’s film uses trees as a means for talking about people. “Oftentimes, what we think is our subject is the window dressing,” says Taylor. “People are really the subject of this film.” There are breathtaking pictures of, and fascinating stories about, trees, but the lessons are existential.

The entanglements, Taylor says, are us: “We were pointing our cameras at the trees, but only peripherally.” We see how the lives of these tree-obsessed characters morph around the circumstances they’re dealt. Ever-present are trees doing the same thing, just more slowly. “That’s what we should wish for ourselves,” Taylor says. “We’re not trying to be pristine and perfect until we die.”