Wild Relatives
directed by Jumana Manna, Germany/Norway/Lebanon 2018, 70'
Deep under Norway’s permafrost in a vault, seeds from around the world are kept inside a Global Seed Bank in the event of a disaster. In 2012, the media spread the news that the gene bank in Aleppo had to abandon its collections and move to Lebanon as a result of the civil war. Then, for the first time, seeds from the Norwegian bank were used. The film tracks the path they must travel between Norway and Lebanon, revealing the complex dependencies and relationships between humans and non-humans. In the Middle East, the greatest threat is drought and global agricultural corporations, but behind the Arctic Circle – where the seeds were to survive everything – the rise in temperature and the melting of the glacier are now becoming apparent threats. The film combines various biographies and narratives within itself, creating a space for discussions on biodiversity, survival, global justice as well as climate change. It portrays the man-made disaster and shows the rather ambivalent ways of overcoming it.
