A technician sits hunched over a botanical specimen from the 19th Century, dusting broken bits into a small envelope. A scientist collects lichen samples from the same tree every year. A professor teaches taxonomy to her students.

Moving through the spaces of herbariums and expedition sites in Portugal, the film reveals the Sisyphean task of data collection and knowledge production. Every morning people set out to find a little bit more about the natural world and each new piece of information expands the world infinitely.

With each inquiry into a new specimen, however, some questions seem to persistently re-appear —Will a botanist ever mount the final specimen? What is lost with the double flattening of a flower into a specimen into a .png file? Why is the succulent named after a dictator?

The title of the film gestures toward an impossible task: to categorise and hold the living world within an archive. While motivated by the promise of preservation, we are often challenged by history, and compelled to admit that something may always escape the grasp of our systems.

How to Download a Forest is a human story and about how small we are. It slowly becomes clear that the world does not need us to know it, but we keep trying anyway.