Navigation auf uzh.ch
Navigation auf uzh.ch
‘Seed Stories’ (42 min, 2024), a documentary film directed by Chitrangada Choudhury, an Indian journalist, filmmaker and a PhD candidate in Economic Geography at GIUZ, has screened at multiple cultural and educational institutions and been selected for film festivals in India, USA, Italy and Switzerland over the past year.
The film draws on Choudhury’s long-term environmental reportage and work as a conservation volunteer in the region to explore ecological rupture in the Niyamgiri mountains of eastern India, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspot. It narrates three interwoven strands: the barefoot ecologist Dr Debal Deb’s efforts to conserve over 1500 endangered heirloom rice varieties in-situ, the knowledge-rich polycropping food systems of the local Adivasi (Indigenous) communities who have been denigrated since colonial times as ‘underdeveloped/backward’, and the coming of chemical-intensive genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant cotton seeds to this ecologically sensitive landscape.
As visual anthropology and public scholarship, ‘Seed Stories’ seeks to take debates over environmental justice, industrial agriculture, farmer sovereignty and biodiversity conservation to audiences within and beyond the academy. Reviewing the film in the American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker Dolly Kikon wrote:
“The film offers a sharp and poignant story about sustainability in the era of genetically modified crops and toxic herbicides… As an anthropologist who also makes films, I have often wondered what we offer the academy and the world. The images of empty herbicide packets and bottles discarded across the land depressed me. Really. What do anthropologists who make documentary films offer during a time of genocide, war, and planetary crisis? Seed Stories is a brilliant film that answers my question. We reach out to an audience beyond the academy and adopt an Adivasi (Indigenous) epistemology to meditate, advocate, teach, and work on sustainability.”
‘Seed Stories’ has been selected by festivals like the Kolkata People’s Film Festival, the Festival delle Terre Rome, the Give Peace A Screen Festival Torino, the All Living Things Environmental Film Festival and the Farm to Film Festival Iowa. In India, it has screened at leading academic and cultural institutions including the Delhi School of Economics, the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Prithvi Theatre Mumbai, the Museum of Goa, and India International Centre, Delhi. In coming months, the film will also screen in the USA including at the universities of Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. In Switzerland, it has screened at the Graduate Institute, Geneva as well as at the ETH Sustainable Agrosystems Greenhouse Lab as part of Swiss Agroecology Month (October 2024). The film has seen multiple public screenings in Italy through the Centro Internazionale Crocevia, a network founded in 1958 and dedicated to issues of the environment, food sovereignty, farmer and farmworker rights. Choudhury and her collaborators will work on multilingual versions of the film over 2025-27 to reach different rural audiences in India.
Review of Seed Stories (2024) in the American Anthropologist
written by Dolly Kikon (University of California, Santa Cruz)
A news report in The New Indian Express on a screening of Seed Stories in Delhi in January 2025: More clouds, less of silver lining
04 Feb, 2025
A news report in Il Manifesto on a screening of Seed Stories in Rome: «Le sirene dell’agrobusiness mettono a rischio le pratiche dell’agroecologia»
30 May, 2024
A news report in The Hindu on a screening of Seed Stories in Bangalore: Why communities should retain their heirloom seeds and knowledge systems
24 Aug, 2024
Title image: A still from the documentary film ‘Seed Stories’. Photo Credit: Chitrangada Choudhury
