The inhabitants of a city awake one morning to find that never-before-seen trees, plants, and flowers suddenly erupted throughout the streets and in the squares. Strange and mysterious events start taking place as Camelia and Nahla investigate the origins of these new and peculiar creatures. “The image that inspired the film was that of a plant in the dark illuminated by a flashlight. I think there was something about the appearance and disappearance of the plant under the movement of the flashlight that captivated me. It was also an image that made me feel that something mysterious was about to happen. So I started making images of plants at night, plants that I found in the streets of Beirut. I took these images with my mobile phone. Little by little, I found myself collecting images of plants that I came across here and elsewhere, night and day. It became an obsession. I noticed the way they occupied the space. I had the impression that they were coming from somewhere else, that they weren’t part of the urban fabric of the city but were intruding on it. I grew up with the image of Beirut as a concrete city with no trees or plants. This is true, in the sense that there are no green spaces such as parks, gardens and woods. It’s true that concrete takes up a lot of space, but the flora exists, it’s just that it’s wild and not really organised. That’s all I could see in the city: trees, plants and flowers. This stubbornness created in my imagination the story of a hidden garden that would be the origin of the presence of plants in this concrete city.” (Nour Ouayda)

Moving between scripted scenes, documentary and archival footage, Foragers explores how the traditional Palestinian practice of foraging wild edible plants — namely ’akkoub and za’atar — is criminalised by the Israeli government. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land while Israeli state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the inherited love, joy and knowledge in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on. “As much as the film is about all of the legal battles that Rabea has worked on, the starting point was a place of joy, from really loving to be out in nature finding, picking, and learning about all of these different plants. I mean, it’s quite an incredible feeling in the springtime in Palestine. You don’t really need to go to the supermarket. There are so many wild-growing edibles, it is magical. That was very central when I started working on the film, and I wanted it to remain central. I wanted joy to be felt as much if not stronger than the anger towards the criminalization of the practice.” (Jumana Manna)