The Concert That's Also a Documentary: Sam Green Brings Trees to Miami Beach

There is no clean category for what Sam Green does. He calls it live cinema — documentary film that unfolds in real time, with the director narrating live, the score performed live by an orchestra, and the audience experiencing something that cannot be replicated or streamed. Each screening is, by design, different from the last. The New York Times has called his work "unique and ephemeral," which is both accurate and insufficient.

On March 27, 2027, New World Symphony presents the Miami premiere of Trees — Green's most ambitious project to date. The score is by Caroline Shaw, who in 2013 became the youngest composer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The narration is written by Green and Rebecca Solnit, the essayist and activist whose work on memory, place, and the natural world has made her one of the most important American writers of the past two decades. The film features actress Judi Dench, artist Ersin Han Ersin (known as Marshmallow Laser Feast), and scientists and storytellers from around the world.

The subject is trees — not as backdrop or metaphor, but as subjects in their own right. Trees is a study of humankind's relationship to these organisms that have been on Earth for 385 million years, that communicate through underground fungal networks, that outlive every human civilization that has grown up around them. Green approaches the subject with the same rigor and tenderness he brought to his earlier live cinema works, including The Measure of All Things and A Thousand Thoughts.

What makes the New World Center an ideal venue for this work is the building's own technological infrastructure. The hall is equipped with a 147-speaker Meyer Sound Constellation acoustic system, a 180-degree projection system, and the capacity to integrate live performance with film in ways that most concert halls cannot. Shaw's score — which she has described as an attempt to capture the time scale of trees, the slowness and depth of their existence — will be performed live by NWS Fellows while Green narrates from the stage and the film plays around them.

Trees is produced by ArKtype and Josh Penn, with cinematography by Yoni Brook and editing by Gabriel Rhodes. It is, by any measure, one of the most significant events on the Miami cultural calendar for the spring of 2027.

Trees screens Saturday, March 27, 2027 at 7:30 PM at New World Center, 500 17th Street, Miami Beach. Tickets at nws.edu.