Daughters of the Forest: Mycelium Chronicles
Completed: 2026
Deep in Mexico’s forests, this immersive sci-fi doc follows the unusual, fungi-driven paths of two indigenous mycologists as they seek to reconcile the past and present while reimagining the future for themselves and the changing world they inhabit.
About the Film
Daughters of the Forest: Mycelium Chronicles is a story of entanglements: between humans and mushrooms; the visible and the invisible; generational knowledge and modern science.
This immersive sci-fi documentary takes viewers on an unexpected, sometimes speculative exploration of the realities of two indigenous communities and the fungi in the forests of Mexico, inviting them to reconsider the perceptions and experiences of both the human and non-human inhabitants of our world.
Lis and Juli, two scientifically-trained young women, both come from communities that have long lived in symbiosis with the diverse mushrooms in their distinct regions of Oaxaca and Mexico State in Mexico. They strive to further collective understanding of the fungi with which human existence is entwined. But the world they know is changing, and their pursuits are threatened by deforestation, lack of opportunity, and loss. Along their parallel paths, they share their knowledge and reveal how mushrooms show different possibilities of coexistence, helping them overcome obstacles and reshape their lives and futures.
Primary theme:
Biodiversity & Species Protection
Additional themes:
Indigenous Leadership.
Preservation & Regeneration,
Science, Knowledge & Innovation,
Community Power & Movement Building, Representation,
Nature Connection
Director
Producer
Full Project Budget:
$1,059,000
Funds Still Needed:
$271,350
Type of Funding Needed:
Impact
Production Status:
Complete, Festival Circuit
To learn more about this project, contact us and we will put you in touch with the film team.
Impact Goals
Amplify Underrepresented Communities
Shine a light on communities with multi-generational mushroom knowledge who are being left out of the current global mushroom boom, and bring their voices directly into these conversations.
Shift the Narrative by Bridging Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge
Challenge the tendency within scientific circles to dismiss ancestral knowledge as merely spiritual, and advocate for a more inclusive perspective that recognizes the value of integrating both knowledge systems.
Replicate Community-Based Models of Sustainable Mushroom Stewardship
Adapt and expand successful models of sustainable mushroom foraging and reforestation to other forest communities in similar contexts—helping dignify and preserve Indigenous knowledge while enabling communities to sustain themselves from the land.
Build a “Mycelial Network” Across Movements
Foster connections across the diverse ecosystems shaping the mushroom boom—gastronomic, medical, scientific, environmental, and Indigenous—to encourage collaboration, knowledge exchange, and collective impact.
Director’s Statement
Otilia Portillo
Director
Mushroom foragers often say the mushroom finds you. In my case, mushrooms found me just as I was searching for ways to counteract the apocalyptic narratives of the future.
The apocalyptic story is one we know all too well. It slaps us in the face each time we turn on the news or look at our phone: genocide, mass extinctions, climate emergencies, and an arc of history that seems to bend not towards justice but towards fascism. Our present increasingly resembles science fiction dystopias.
In order to imagine other possible futures, we must imagine other kinds of stories. Here we start with the one that takes shape when we listen to fungi.
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Fungi challenge our preconceived notions of the world. They invite us to look beyond the surface, explore the unknown, adapt, respect imperfections and different forms of life. They suggest that there is renewal in the very death and decay that we humans are so conditioned to fear.
We aim to create: a cinema of interdisciplinary alliances between different human and non-human communities, a collaboration between foragers, indigenous communities, scientists, filmmakers, artists and fungi. I am honored to tell this story as part of a web of collaborators.
Cinema allows us to inhabit other points of view and forms of being—to see and feel the invisible—but speculation allows us to rethink the world to come.
We want to change the narrative of extraction to that of collaboration, introducing new kinds of heroes that are already actively building better futures.
Through a mycelial lens, we come to observe the elements of the world. We have applied the ethos of fungi to this film’s construction—which is not a mono-narrative, but a tangle of interwoven stories. As filmmakers, as women, and as human beings who are both frightened of what the future may hold and optimistic that the future is still unwritten, we seek to move beyond the boundaries of a screen to enable the film to generate its own network and inspire new ways of seeing the world we share.