Wild Relatives

Syrian girls in refugee camps in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, work as seed pickers in wheat fields belonging to ICARDA, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Desert Areas, which does research to create new species resistant to diseases and the adverse climatic conditions. A priest and a researcher talk about climate change in Longyearbyen, on the island of Svalbard, in Norway, where ICARDA transferred its global seed bank in 2013, in order to provide coverage in case of climate disasters. Here, specimens of seeds from a gene bank previously located in Aleppo, transferred to Lebanon at the outbreak of war in Syria, are being replicated for the first time. Personal events from distant parts of the world are freely connected by Jumana Manna in this documentary, with an environmental theme as a narrative link. To defeat climatic conditions adverse to agriculture and oppose global corporations like ICARDA is the challenge for Middle Eastern farmers, who see native species replaced by ones selected in laboratories. In the Arctic Circle, where the seed bank should’ve been safe, temperatures rise and glaciers melt, upsetting the ecosystem. Wild Relatives addresses debate denvironmental issues and opens a space for reflection on biodiversity, resilience and climate change, as well as on man-made disasters and ambivalent efforts to remedy them.