Coming to theatres this Friday, May 22: SEEDS OF TIME
Sandy McLeod’s cautionary tale about the future of our food debuted at SXSW last year. Other fest appearances have included Berlin, CPH:DOX, Full Frame, and Seattle, among others.
McLeod’s film profiles Cary Fowler, a renowned agriculturalist who has been at the forefront of preserving biodiversity through seed saving and storage, most famously through the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a remote Norwegian seed bank located just 800 miles from the North Pole. Operating against the grain of our modern, industrial farming industry, which privileges monocultures as a way to maximize profits, Fowler and his fellow preservationists warn of the potential catastrophic damage that could easily be wrought on our global food supply if a new disease were to wipe out the single strain of crops upon which we’ve grown to depend. The projects he champions around the world aim to preserve crop diversity for the benefit of future generations, from large scale efforts like Svalbard to regionally-specific initiatives, such as a partnership with indigenous Peruvians to prevent the further loss of hundreds of varieties of potatoes to climate change. Fowler emerges as a passionate, if somewhat dry, advocate, and McLeod offers an often visually arresting backdrop while while traversing the globe with her protagonist, but the film often proves over-reliant on statistics and a fairly repetitive survey approach.
what (not) to doc 