A man with a close bond to wilderness and the people who live in it has a terrible accident. He dies for a number of minutes before being resuscitated by an ambulance crew. When he regains consciousness in hospital, he has lost his memory and doesn’t even know who he is. It is he who once wrote the following:

‘The Wetland Park must be the only place on the globe where the world’s oldest land mammal (the rhinoceros) and the world’s biggest terrestrial mammal (the elephant) share an ecosystem with the world’s oldest fish (the coelacanth) and the world’s biggest marine mammal (the whale). There can be no better icon for the holistic approach we are taking to conservation than the development of the St Lucia Wetland Park.” Nelson Mandela read these words to inaugurate the park. Eddie Koch has no memory of having written them nor the newspaper articles, or the film proposals about St. Lucia.

Over months he recovers some of his past but still finds reading or writing extremely difficult because he cannot remember a sentence immediately after he has read or written it.

The sand forests around St Lucia are also struggling to recover an original memory: as the plantations of alien trees are felled, the pioneer plants that were bulldozed decades ago for pine and gum plantations are beginning to emerge with the help of managed burns. Bushbuck, rhino and elephant are already grazing there, but it’s a slow and steady process, even though the regimented stumps still occasionally come into alignment as one drives past.

The Unforgetting draws a parallel and shows that the retrieval of memory in an ecosystem is, as in a human mind, an ongoing struggle. St Lucia has survived attempts to mine its dunes, land invasions and constant pressure of a burgeoning population along its borders, just like Eddie has survived his terrifying car accident. He now spends time here as his friends help him trace the progress of an extraordinary project in the hope that it will help him in the process of unforgetting. This is his story.

DIRECTOR PROFILE: Clifford Bestall

Clifford is the only film director in the world to have won two prestigious Grierson Awards, the director’s prize for the best documentary screened on British television in any year. Other recognition of his work includes an Emmy nomination, a Rotterdam Prize, a Peabody award and a local Artes for one of the Ordinary People series he directed in 1993. He also won the Cameraman of the Year award by the Royal Photographic Society in 1988.