Wild Relatives – Documentary showing at Croft Road Cinema

Wild Relatives, a 2018 documentary about growing cultures and displacement through the journey of seeds from Syria to Lebanon. It’s an exploration of uneasy global relationships and how industries challenge and perpetuate climate change.

Croft Road cinema on Thursday 23 June, 7pm for a 7.30pm start. One for Future Hawick’s audiences?

Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: 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 Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.

Captioned for D/deaf audiences, with tickets at a sliding scale (£3 / £5 / £7, pay what you can)