Wild Relatives
+Syrian Interest
+Palestinian Artist
Sunday, 9/30
11:00 a.m.
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Join us after the film for a discussion with scientists Abdulla A. Jaradat and Dawud Mulla.
OFF THE GRID
Sarah Hassan
short documentary
9 mins / 2018
UAE
English
Minnesota premiere
With a university degree, a corporate job, and a stable marriage, Fadi Hachicho seemed like someone who had it all. However, as he celebrates his thirtieth birthday, he finds that he cannot ignore the incessant voice in his head telling him there must be more to life than just this. Following Fadi through his past and present, Off the Grid questions whether our modern-day concept of success is really the ultimate goal.
Sarah Hassan is a Dubai-based producer at CNN Arabic. She has a BA in broadcast journalism from the American University in Dubai, where she also directed and produced the short student documentaries Without a Frame and Turoq. She produced a feature independent documentary, The Borrowed Dress, which was released in February.
WILD RELATIVES حب بري
Jumana Manna
documentary
66 mins / 2018
Lebanon / Norway / Germany
English, Arabic, and Norwegian with English subtitles
Minnesota premiere
Deep beneath Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, ready to be accessed should disaster strike. In 2012, due to the Syrian war, one center that provides seeds to the vault, an international agricultural research center in Aleppo, was forced to relocate to Lebanon. Thus began the laborious process of drawing from their seed collection at Svalbard to restart the process of producing new seeds on Lebanese soil. Chronicling these seeds’ transportation and cultivation, Wild Relatives presents a matrix of human and plant lives and their encounters across two distant places on earth. A meditative pace teases out tensions between the state and the individual as well as industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change, and biodiversity, all witnessed through the journey of these seeds.
Festivals and Awards:
Berlin International Film Festival, Germany, 2018
Environmental Award, Sheffield Doc/Fest, UK, 2018
New Vision Award, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, Denmark, 2018
Jumana Manna is a Palestinian artist working primarily with film and sculpture. Her work explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of state-building and histories of place. Manna received a BFA from the National Academy of Arts in Oslo and an MA in aesthetics and politics from California Institute of the Arts.
