Director Jumana Manna Germany/Libanon/Norway 2018
65 Min., OV with English subs
Followed by a talk with Jumana Manna and Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein & Eirini Fountedaki
The starting point of Wild Relatives is an event that sparked worldwide media interest: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Global Seed Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of the seeds from the Arctic to Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives caught between these two distant spots of the earth.
Jumana Mannais a Berlin-based visual artist working primarily with film and sculpture. She was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012 and the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts in 2017. Her work has been shown in various film festivals and exhibitions.
Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein & Eirini Fountedaki form a curatorial duo interested in embodied knowledge and slowing down processes of production. They co-curated the film series Residing in the Borderlands at SAVVY Contemporary, and are now part of the Berlin Biennial 11 curatorial workshop how now to gather.