The crew of The Last Season, a film by Sara Dosa, began shooting without a distinct purpose. Shot in the summer of 2011 in Chemult, Oregon (population 135), we see the small community balloon as a troupe of outsiders are drawn for the annual mushroom hunting season; the matsutake is the prey. The crew began documenting the lives and stories of more than twelve different groups of people, but then as the large picture fell away, what remained was the film’s main topic of investigation- the relationship between war veteran Roger Higgins, and former Khmer Rouge freedom fighter Kouy Loch.
Higgins was a sniper for the US Special Forces who after returning to the US from Vietnam, began suffering from terrible shell-shock. To ease his anxiety he explains how he took to the forest as a haven, and eventually earned about matsutake. Loch learned the mushroom trade in Cambodia when foraging for food while on the run from the Khmer Rouge. Both men are soldiers, survivors of atrocious wars and they bond over this. As the film progresses, we learn more and more about their unusual relationship and about the matsutake.
Mushroom hunting requires a certain intuitive person, a person that can balance the energy of the forest such that the elusive mushroom will reveal itself to them. Hunters then are a unique people that choose to make their living following the mushroom. matsutake can only be grown in the wild, at certain times of year, under very strict conditions. Nomadic and wild, but not reckless and untamed. Hunters and hunted. Director Dosa suggests that the matsutake is a metaphor. It is very valuable and very hard to find. It fetches between $40-280 a pound as a delicacy in Japan, but just as the matsutake’s existence is a botanical and gastronomical miracle, it is also a redactor, a conjoiner creates circumstances for opportunity. matsutake brought Higgins and Loch together, and their story is just one of many surrounding the Chemult harvest.
The film features striking camera work; in shots where seasons change and landscapes are lingering for affect, it seems to almost speak. Interspersed within the narrative, these shots are like brief glimpses of lush pastoral watercolors. The Last Season takes us beyond the scrounge for the current market price per pound. After we glimpse a redefinition of friendship and family, the snow begins.
