The AV Club: Films at SITE

Screening of Wild Relatives (2018)

FREE

SITElines.2018 artist Jumana Manna’s (b.1987 Princeton, NJ; lives in Berlin and Beirut) new film, Wild Relatives (2018), follows the complexity of a withdrawal of seeds from the Svalbard Seed Bank situated between Norway and the North Pole, and their journey to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, and the occasion’s global implications.

Jumana Manna has created a profound meditation on resilience in an era defined by displacement, climate change, and war. Wild Relatives documents the complex pathway of seed distribution between Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and the Global Seed Vault deep inside Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Manna’s beautifully photographed, itinerant documentary starts in the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)—a Lebanon-based gene bank of unique landraces and cereals, headquartered in Aleppo until 2012—and weaves through an intricate network of genealogists, refugees, farmers, and depositors as they safeguard endangered seeds through traditional and innovative agricultural methods.

Germany/Lebanon/Norway

English, Arabic, Norwegian with English subtitles (66 minutes)