From film festivals to infiltrating global academic conferences with natural farming knowledge, we’ve had an eventful Spring/Summer so far!
We are happy that the new “Food, Earth, Happiness” short film has recently been selected for two festivals. The first of these is the Strano Film Festival in Italy. We are one of 29 films selected, and it’s especially compelling that the festival’s theme “A FESTIVAL OF THE LAND” is not just lip service, but a call to action for a region to re-connect their way of living again with the land. If any of you are around Capestrano (the Abruzzo region of Italy) this would be a really special event in a beautiful old hillside town. The second festival is the International Nature Film Festival, which amazingly, is a festival about nature sponsored by János Áder, the president of Hungary. The festival takes place in Gödöllő, and will screen films in 30 other locations in Hungary.
Here in Japan, we have been invited to give a talk and exhibition of images from the film the ASIA BOOK MARKET which takes place in the center of Osaka’s main commercial district at the Hankyu Department Store. It seems an uninteresting venue, but we should let you in on a little secret: this store was the location for a few scenes in our film (the scenes that poke fun as consumerism). Thanks to IN/SECTS Magazine, we have the opportunity to do a bit more of this, from the belly of the beast so to speak. The events will take place from July 24-29 at Hankyu Umeda, located directly in the central Osaka train station.
Lastly, Patrick just returned from Paris, where he was one of three curators (along with Carmen Bouyer and Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro) of an exhibition called the Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Knowledge (FRIEK). Together they designed, built, and curated an arts platform to augment the Nature of Cities Summit, a global conference of ecologists, urban planners, and others from academic and government roles who met at Sorbonne University this June. A total of 371 attendees came from 52 different countries to figure out how to build cities that work together with nature rather than against it.
The role of the arts exhibitions and performances was to help challenge the framework of established knowledge, allowing new ideas for sustaining cities to be generated in collaboration between disciplines and species. The art installation included several components related to our documentary Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness, including film clips, a tree meditation workshop by Emilio Fantin, and a bookshelf highlighting knowledge from Masanobu Fukuoka, Larry Korn, Yoshikazu Kawaguchi, and others.