Last month, courtesy of our sponsor, the health foods company Nutiva, we brought you the film Fresh. This month, on February 27, at 4:30 p.m. at the Ojai Theatre, under the same Nutiva sponsorship, the Coalition will be showing Our Seeds: Seeds Blong Yumi, a 57-minute film in praise of traditional food plants and the people who grow them. A community seed exchange will follow the film, so bring any spare seeds to trade. For a pdf of the Our Seeds: Seeds Blong Yumi event, click here.
Our Seeds, originally made for free distribution to Pacific audiences, addresses the problems of globalized food based on hybrids that require pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and shows how individuals and small groups have solved these problems. It’s a celebration of empiric seed saving practices and diverse farming cultures around the world, and of the seed keepers who stand at the source of humanity’s diverse food heritage. Because it was made for the people of the Pacific, the DVD is being hand-delivered there: into villages by canoe and up narrow walking tracks, passed from family to family.
The film is a David and Goliath story in which resilience and persuasive logic triumph over the seemingly invincible forces that control the production of most of the world’s food. To make it, Michel Fanton and Jude Fanton of the Seed Savers Foundation, joined occasionally by a local soundperson, took 160 hours of footage in many countries of Europe, Asia, and Oceania.
Our Seeds features Pacific islanders as they face great challenges to their way of life, their culture, and their traditional cultivation systems. They fall into the same traps as others, replacing innumerable varieties of root staples with modern hybrids that require pesticides and chemical fertilizers, importing low-quality foods such as white rice, cookies, and noodles, and thereby risking the loss of their own food crops. The film seeks to reverse this trend. Its rich sound track features mostly indigenous music recorded in the making of the film.
Intended to encourage the further development of local seed saving groups and seed exchanges, the film explores the relationship between traditional biodiversity and traditional culture in wide-ranging locations. There are interviews with farmers and expert commentators as well as documented seed saving, farming methods, and cultural activities in both First World and tribal locations. According to the filmmakers, when it comes to traditional plant varieties, peasants in such advanced countries as France, Italy, Spain, and Taiwan share the same sentiments as indigenous Pacific farmers.
The Seed Savers Foundation affirms that it will continue telling the stories of the lives of traditional seed guardians and their importance to the world. Clips from Our Seeds can be found at youtube.com/seedsavers and www.seedsavers.net.
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