I saw this film when it screened in Vancouver during the Vancouver International Film Festival recently. This documentary touches on several different subjects and it is worth a look and see.

Want to know how to really save the planet? Coline Serreau’s “radical and exhilarating” (Le Nouvel Observateur) documentary-cum-manifesto offers a good beginning. Serreau returns to her roots, quite literally, to dig deeply into the highly political world of organic agriculture, with help from some very knowledgeable and often witty international experts. Who knew soil could be this rich a topic!

“When we are dealing with seeds, we are dealing with life itself.” As one might expect from Serreau, a strong feminist perspective underpins the film. And her experienced eye as a director means the film is as visually gripping as its arguments are persuasive. This sets it apart and endows the material with a kind of luminous perspicacity. Contributor after contributor – whether from France, Brazil, Morocco, Ukraine or India – demonstrates the importance of seeds and the quasi-monopoly held on their production and distribution by firms such as Monsanto. Claude Bourguignon, co-founder of Laboratory of Soil Microbiological Analyses in France, and Vandana Shiva, at her experimental farm in India, are particularly entertaining and illuminating.

“Alarmist and disaster films have been made, and they have served their purpose; now it is time to show that solutions do exist, to give a voice to farmers, philosophers and economists who are inventing and experimenting with new alternatives, all the while explaining why our society is mired in the current ecological, financial and political crisis.” – Coline Serreau

(France, 2010, 113 mins, DigiBeta) In French with English subtitles

By: Richard Wolak

Source: Vancouver International Film Festival