WILD RELATIVES - JUMANA MANNA 2018

Svalbard in the Arctic circle and the Bekaa valley in Lebanon have very little in common, but share semi-desertic climates and geographies.
They are also at the two ends of a complex and intriguing transaction of plant seeds :

Due to the Syrian war, a seed bank, originally created to preserve plant variety both for conservation and for the needs of the agro industry for gene diversity, had to relocate to the Bekaa valley. Unable to access its collection in Syria, it goes to the Global seed vault in the Arctic to get its own seeds back, plant them again in Lebanon, and return samples to Svalbard.

Intrigued by these circulations and their parallels to the ones of humans, Wild Relatives follows a number of characters engaging with land in various ways, extracting coal out of mountains, planting the earth with seeds, escaping war in one valley, philosophizing about another, thus tackling environmental and ideological issues through simple lives of people.

Wild Relatives - Jumana Manna 2018

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