Thérèse cultivates a Creole garden in Guadeloupe. She resists invisible poisons. Her hands merge with the earth. Her face with the light. “The garden was part of a decolonial activism for Thérèse, as it was a means of cultivating the land by her own means and cleaning it up in the face of widespread pollution. Historically, chlordecone is an insecticide used on a massive scale in the French West Indies and placed on the market in an abusive manner at the beginning of the 1970s, by dispensation of the Minister of Agriculture at the time, Jacques Chirac. Intended to combat banana parasitism, its industrial and colonial use led to pollution of natural environments and poisoning of plant, animal and human life. Frédérique Menant’s film places eco- logical awareness at the heart of the ecofeminist and post-colonial question: the garden becomes a utopian land of rewilding, of regaining power, of regeneration. By placing the relationship between the cultivated and the wild within the same filmic and agrarian perimeter, the filmmaker leaves behind Western dualism to reclaim the idea of continuity: ‘Recognise the culture that has been denied in the sphere conceived as pure nature, and recognise the nature that has been denied in the sphere conceived as pure culture.’” (Elio Della Noce)

In order to challenge the understanding of nature situated apart from human, Shape Shifting suggest another arrangement where human and nonhuman join relations and productively interact. It outlines an affective cartogra- phy of a specific landscape, which exhibits a high natural diversity and is called “satoyama” in Japanese.“Mapping onscreen the enmeshments and intimacies that bind together humans and other-than-humans such as weeds — what Shape Shifting does by delving into the Japanese satoyama (the border zone or area between mountain foothills, yama, and the arable flat land next to the villages, sato) — Lylov and Marhöfer show us that exploring the other-than-human by means of film is already a means of shaping affective relationships encompassing human and machinic fellows. The joyful myriad of other-than-human agents potentially implicated are far from being limited to organic actants... Shape Shifting reminds us that other-than human subjects hint at specific modes of sensing, feeling, affecting, and being affected. Filming here means attuning human makers and human spectators to the sensibilities of the soil, weeds, and wind. In this sense, the film is an experiment in becoming with, a matter of alliances and counter-encounters.” (Teresa Castro)

Shot over a period of five years in 13 locations around the U.S, Accession traces an intimate collection of letters, originally written to accompany seed packets sent between friends and family across the United States, which date as far back as 1806, and are poetically narrated as reflections of life in rural America. “Heirloom seeds and 16mm film embody memory in a becalmed epistolary tour of American experience. Read aloud in mellifluous regional accents, letters between ‘seed-savers’ suspend us in a fading vision of an agrarian nation, where generation after generation has handed down and cultivated the same peas, gourds, marigolds, and hyacinths. The places across the United States where Hassan and Tufenkian shot their film over several years—the same origins and destinations for the letters we hear — contain not just timeless farmlands but also cars and railroads of contemporary vintage (as well as, oddly enough, a couple of performers in a historical reenactment). The effect is a kind of secular prayer and a paean to decency and communal duty, as the diversity of the seeds and weathered film stocks feed a soulful sense of continuity that stretches from the 1800s up to now. “It doesn’t seem right to throw away [experience],” one correspondent writes, and in the silences between the letters (passing through states such as Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Louisiana), the filmmakers create a space for unhurried contemplation of what lies before us.” (Nicolas Rapold—Viennale)