Kunuji Kulusika crouches over a silver plate on which numerous little piles of seeds are arranged and reels off their names. There are about a dozen-odd types of seeds on the plate, including beans, small beans, horse gram, pigeon peas, mustard, corn, and niger seeds, a collection that Kunuji is evidently proud of, going by the broad smile she offers as she finishes going over the names. “These are seeds we have always grown,” we hear her say in Seed Stories, a recently released documentary directed by Chitrangada Choudhury. “A bit of this, a bit of that... many different things... that is how we farm,” continues the ebullient Kunuji, an indigenous agroecological farmer who lives in the Niyamgiri mountains of Odisha’s Eastern Ghats, where the film is set. “Why should we go to the market for seeds?”
This documentary, which was screened at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in collaboration with the Bengaluru Sustainability Forum (BSF), is part of Climate Charche, a series hosted and curated by BSF. According to the concept note for Climate Charche, the series is envisaged as a series of engagements on the inter linkages between different aspects of climate change and city systems. “These engagements for dialogue, deliberation and learning will be facilitated across different audience groups in the city, with an aim to exchange knowledge, and identify gaps in city level plans; foregrounding adaptation, resilience and climate justice,” it states.
Chitrangada Choudhury, Aniket Aga and Dr. Debal Deb at the session at NCBS. | Photo Credit: Ravi Kumar Boyapati
About Seed Stories
Seed Stories is a nuanced exploration of the efforts of barefoot ecologist Dr Debal Deb and his team and their attempt to conserve over 1,000 endangered heirloom varieties of rice in a landscape starting to be besieged by genetically modified cotton seeds and the toxic chemicals needed to grow them. The documentary“takes a worm’s eye view of how this is reshaping a geography and a people steeped in agroecological knowledge, and altering their attitudes towards farming, food and ecology,” states the synopsis. It also invites its audience to reflect on the question of what sustainability really is.
Choudhury, an award-winning journalist and researcher based in Goa, says the film is part of a larger body of work that she has been working on for nearly two decades. “I am from Orissa, but I’ve spent the initial years of my journalistic career in Bombay and Delhi, reporting on Schedule Five landscapes: essentially areas where Scheduled Tribe populations are significant, like parts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa,” she says.
Her reportage often focuses on how mainstream development often translates into brutal and horrific forms of violence inflicted on the communities that live in these landscapes. “It is often justified in the name of development of the nation,” says Choudhury, pointing out that these indigenous communities were often denigrated and seen as being backward in mainstream policy and media narratives “because, how else do you justify the violence of the development project?”
A still from Seed Story | Photo Credit: Chitrangada Choudhury
Question of food sovereignty
Choudhury first met Deb in 2014 while profiling him for a national daily. Deb, she says, is sceptical about what he terms as a ‘develop-mentality’ — a project that demands an endless cycle of inputs, outputs, consumption and waste on a finite planet.
Choudhury and her associate director, Aniket Aga, then began volunteering at Deb’s Basudha farm in the Rayagada district in southern Odisha from 2018 onwards. In this ecologically rich and sensitive part of India, there was a wealth of knowledge among the local people about sustaining biodiversity while maintaining their own food sovereignty, she says. “This has largely disappeared now from the so-called developed parts of India, where communities have lost their own seeds and knowledge systems.”
The film also captures a society on the brink of a monumental shift, the entry of a new form of agriculture, significantly endangering the old, something she began to notice on her visits there. While farming practices in this part of Odisha have a history that stretches back a few thousand years, cotton, which needs copious inputs, is slowly destroying them. “This kind of chemicalised monoculture cannot coexist with their longstanding poly cropping systems,” she says. “The erasure, again in the name of development, is what the film is essentially about.”
The process of documenting the dramatic change in agricultural practices and its impact on people’s lives happened “spontaneously,” says Choudhury. It made her think about visually documenting what she had observed and learnt since “in a few years probably this landscape will have irreversibly changed,” she believes, referring to the inroads cotton is making on traditional agricultural practices in the region. She thinks of it as a slow and insidious form of violence, happening plot by plot, farm by farm, implicating people in these global cotton supply chains but on precarious terms. “As Dr. Deb says in the film, cotton — any cotton — is not right for that landscape. Once communities lose their own seeds, it will be tough to retrieve the ecological resources which had sustained them for so long,” she says.
Seed Story documentary poster. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRAGEMENT
Shooting and more
Seed Stories, peppered with gorgeous shots of cloud-swathed hills sandwiched between fecund rice fields and an azure sky, is as much about the landscape the film is set in as the people who live there. Close-ups of varicoloured seeds, scarlet bugs clustering on damp cotton bolls, an army of ants, a spider nestling in its gossamer web and a strung-up herbicide bottle jostle with sweeping shots of a train rumbling past grazing cattle, smouldering forests and cotton-studded fields, hinting both at the rich biodiversity of this region and the inevitable changes that are creeping into it.
While most of these visual elements were captured between 2019 and 2022, the shoots were largely planned to chronicle specific parts of the agricultural season e.g. sowing and harvest times, and also during Aga and her visits to volunteer on the farm, states Choudhury. “It was a sort of slow ethnographic process, and we also wanted to build a rapport with the people we filmed over time,” she says.
They also worked closely with Chhattisgarh-based filmmaker and human rights activist Ajay T.G. to make the film, a primarily self-funded project. “We had a small grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and a grant for post-production from the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS) at Ashoka University,” she says. “The film happened on the side while we did our research and other projects.”
Film release
An early cut of the film premiered at the Kolkata People’s Film Festival in January this year (KPFF 2024), an independent cinema festival. It has also been screened at the Chennai International Documentary & Short Film Festival, Festival delle Terre, Rome and several independent venues in the country. Additionally, the film has been selected for this year’s All Things Living Environmental Film Festival (ALT EFF), which will take place in November. “We’d certainly like to enter it in a few more international film festivals also, depending on resources and interest,” says Choudhury, who hopes to make the film publicly available once it has finished the film festival circuit. “We plan to try and just screen it to as many audiences as possible…educational institutions, environmental groups, civil society groups who are working on the ground and, of course, indigenous rights groups,” she says.
To know more about Seed Stories visit https://www.ourcinema.in/festival/film/seed-stories/
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