Cine-Flora: Trees and Plants Through Migration and Climate

<p>The apple is the favorite fruit of the French, who consume more than fifteen kilos of it per year. But today it is a victim of its success: the market is becoming standardized and impoverished. Gala, Golden, Pink lady and Granny Smith, available all year round at affordable prices, calibrated by the industry, take up all the space. Old apples have almost disappeared from the shelves. To try to save this taste heritage, enthusiasts, cooks and researchers are mobilizing. The organic sector is also interested in old varieties, which use less pesticides.</p> <p><em>La pomme est le fruit pr&eacute;f&eacute;r&eacute; des Fran&ccedil;ais, qui en consomment plus de quinze kilos par an. Mais elle est aujourd&#39;hui victime de son succ&egrave;s : le march&eacute; se standardise et s&#39;appauvrit. Gala, Golden, Pink lady et Granny Smith, disponibles toute l&#39;ann&eacute;e &agrave; des prix abordables, calibr&eacute;s par l&#39;industrie, occupent tout l&#39;espace. Les pommes anciennes ont quasiment disparu des rayons. Pour tenter de sauver ce patrimoine gustatif, des passionn&eacute;s, des cuisiniers ou des chercheurs se mobilisent. La fili&egrave;re bio s&#39;int&eacute;resse &eacute;galement aux vari&eacute;t&eacute;s anciennes, moins gourmandes en pesticides.</em></p>

<p>For as long as humans lived around malus species, they&#39;ve been eating apples. The apple tree has been domesticated, diversified - it has evolved in new ways via natural and artificial selection. But what is the perfect apple?</p> <p>Evolution of crop species: genetics of domestication and diversification.</p> <p>Imagine Science Film Festival 2014, 48hr Competition</p> <p>Scientist: Rachel Mayer,&nbsp;Filmmaker: Maria Juranic</p> <p>Prop: Time Piece<br /> Line of Dialogue: &ldquo;They said it would be ready at noon.&rdquo;<br /> Character: Eleanor Drew, Principal Investigator</p>

<p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In Kazaksthan, in the Tian Shah Mountains, there are forests where prehistoric wild apple-trees grow; some trees are over 30 meters high and their various shaped and coloured apples are so tasty and sweet. What is the mystery behind these trees, still unknown in the West until now? Could they be the ancestors of our cultivated apple-trees, and could Kazakhstan be the Garden of Eden? Through a scientific and historical research, the film introduces the work of Aymal Djangaliev, a Kazakh scientist who dedicated his life to study and preserve these forests; it also introduces the scientific American, English and French research works about the true &#39;miracle&#39; of this biodiversity. We then discover the secret of the extraordinary resistance to the Malus sieversii apple-trees disease, which might give us apples without pesticide in the future.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>Within the human struggle to live and work, and with the materials for survival available for exploitation, seemingly foreign worlds are intertwined in the modern battlefield of patents, ownership, and colonialism. Delving into labor and science practices,<em> A Common Sequence</em> examines who gets to work with the essentials of life &mdash; saving animals from extinction, researching medicine, harvesting food, coding the genome &mdash; in our modern world controlled by data.</p> <p>Filmmakers Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser take us to the areas and people involved in these physical and political worlds with an intuitive visual style, letting the audience experience each location&rsquo;s atmosphere. Take the achoque salamander, which can regenerate limbs and even its heart, the intellectual property rights of apple trees, and the commodification of human DNA. The film eloquently guides us through the philosophy of what is &ldquo;common&rdquo; to everyone in nature and the complicated pursuits of owning materials of the planet and even our bodies, whether for conservation or for sale. The resulting discussion could change all our lives!</p>

<p>Stones are at once the most foundational and the most overlooked parts of our lifeworld. When a retired nature documentary narrator passes a kidney stone, she decides to tell one more story about this forgotten world of stone . A hypnotic essay film asking urgent ecological questions, Apple Cider Vinegar takes the viewer on a journey meeting Palestinian quarry workers, passionate Britisch Geologist and People living on the lava fields of Fogo.</p>

<p>A filmic meditation inviting consideration of perception in vegetal beings.</p> <p>Vision is somatic, of the body. In humans, vision is a dominant sense for most people and can feel indistinguishable from the mind when thoughts, judgements, and reactions are unconsciously triggered through visual experiences. Together, vision and mind can block deeper understandings of phenomena and lead to misinformed actions if intentionally looking beyond the illusory surface of things is not pursued. When we consciously imagine how plants might perceive in ways similar to and different than our own, humans extend beyond anthropocentric perception and behaviour to make space for empathetic relations with the aliveness of the vegetal world with whom we share life on the planet, and who, in turn, perceive humans via their own unique, botanically embodied ways of being.</p> <p>Perception and intelligence in plant life has been gaining scientific attention and recognition in recent decades. gestures toward Plant Vision offers a cinematic meditation on how plants might visually perceive their worlds and inspires viewers to consider other ways trees and plants, in all their varieties, might neurobiologically create images to see in stillness, motion, layers, form, colour, light, shadow, and/or time. The film&rsquo;s audio in turn invites consideration of how plants might be aware of and perceive sound in their environments, and includes contemplation on the hypothesis of plant vision by Dr. Paco Calvo, a leader in philosophy of plant neurobiology, behaviour and signalling, and Principle Investigator of the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the Universidad de Murcia, Spain. Once the human is finished speaking in the film, a quiet simplicity makes space for the plants and for inspirational contemplation on other ways plants might perceive visually and sonically.</p> <p>Imagery and sound for the film were collected and created at the Workshop on Art, Nature, and Technology 2016 led by plant scientist Dr. Stefano Mancuso and held at the garden home of Daniel Spoerri in Tuscany, Italy.</p>