Growing Food and Film: Japan and Mali

Growing Food and Film is an audio essay that asks: What connects soil and celluloid, agriculture and culture, self-sufficiency and self-representation? Thinking with plants and images, the essay visits little-known archives to discover stories of farming collectives in 1970s Japan and Mali who documented their agricultural work on camera. Chronicling unusual experiments in sustainable food production, the films and photographs described here testify to their makers’ understanding of land and social justice. Seen from a contemporary context of global climate crisis, these early experiments in food and visual literacy offer exciting models for ecopolitical action today.