An engaged international documentary for action: the lives and projects of seed savers and defenders.
A Story of Seed Savers and Seed Defenders
SEED ACT tells the stories of the women and men that dedicate their lives and work to preserving and defending our farm seed heritage. In a world choked by restrictive laws that give precedence to the commercial and intellectual property rights of transnational companies over humanity's historic and sacred right to freely sow, reap and exchange natural seeds, saving seeds has become a political act.
At the fringes of our European societies that seem mostly blind to the threats to these fundamental resources, we find brave activists and practitioners from very diverse backgrounds, working in very diverse contexts, all of them ready to act in defence of our seeds.
SEED ACT consists of about 8 different acts or parts, each one allowing us to peek behind the scenes of an inspiring project or life's work in several corners of Europe, to discover who is acting to preserve our seed heritage and our right to seed. These are the people who dare to stand their ground despite a legal framework that increasingly criminalises those that save their own seeds, because they believe seeds are as much a precious as a public good.
This documentary is intended to be an act in itself, one that we hope will help sprout imaginations, motivations and the engagement in the cause of seed freedom, through the real life examples of seed savers and defenders. Through the eyes of our seed heroines and heroes, we question the role of seeds and farming in our modern societies, the threats posed by intensive agriculture and highly concentrated global markets, and the impact of intellectual property right regimes on farm communities and on the right to seed.
We wish SEED ACT to be used as an inspiration, a window to a more nature-based and collaborative world, and as a tool for food advocacy and active citizenship.
Our Engagement
The SEED ACT team consists of people who have already been engaged for a number of years in the reclaiming of our food and seed sovereignty. All of us consider food and farming to be at the core of the challenges that humanity is facing in the third millennium. All of us have gradually embraced more agro-ecological food habits over the years, including producing and/ or processing some of our own food. SEED ACT's director is becoming a seed saver herself, as well as the producer in France and Belgium, and both the director and the executive producer are organisers of the Portuguese Seed Freedom campaign. Many of the film's volunteers and supporters come from seed savers associations, community gardens or food activist groups, are part of the permaculture movement or have chosen the peasant's way of life.
We are making a film about what we ourselves believe in: that acting with and for traditional seeds might be the only way to keep them out of the claws of seed laws and monopolist seed corporations.
Read more and support the project here > http://igg.me/at/seedactfilm