Deep beneath the Arctic permafrost, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores seeds from all over the world as a backup against disaster. Wild Relatives starts in 2012, when an international agricultural research center flees the Syrian war from Aleppo to Lebanon and restarts the laborious process of replanting its collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this seed transaction between the Arctic and Lebanon, a matrix of human and non-human encounters unfolds. The film shows how this large-scale international initiative takes local shape in the Bekaa Valley, carried out primarily by young migrant women. At a meditative pace, the film exposes tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic seed saving, and climate change and biodiversity.

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Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores the articulations of power through the body, land, and materiality, in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Moving between the seemingly divergent media of film, abstract sculpture, and collage, Manna focuses on how performing bodies, material fragments, and landscapes desire and narrate pasts, presents, and futures that exceed the violence imposed upon them. Her recent work addresses the paradoxes of preservation, particularly in relation to land use and the law, probing the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and conservation on one hand, and the unruly forces of ruination, life, and regeneration on the other.

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