micro film festival on food & climate change
25-27 November 2022
New Phoenix cinema of GAMIS (Glasgow Artists’ Moving Image Studios)
Tasty Projections is a micro film festival examining our relationship with food, ecology and sustainability through artists’ moving image, speculative fiction and animation.
The change in our climate has become palpable by now, and in the past years, the discourse on the climate emergency became a focal topic in mainstream media as well. However, one source of emissions that is often overlooked is literally in front of us every day: our food. Food systems are significant contributors to the climate crisis with meat and dairy the greatest culprits, therefore, our food consumption is an area that connects us to global ecosystems.
The question ‘How could we reshape our culinary future?’ is central to scientists, politicians, farmers, consumers, as well as creatives. With a climatically and ecologically uncertain future ahead of us, we believe we need to count on the creative and imaginative potential of artists, filmmakers and designers to help us in conceptualizing radical futures – utopias and dystopias included.
The purpose of this minifestival is to showcase how the genres of science and climate fiction imagine human society’s response to these issues and contemplate possibilities of adaptation to this profound and imminent transformation of current food systems. The films screened in the frameworks of the festival combine ecocritical and postcolonial angles, shifting between the scales of locality and globality, of micro and macro perspectives, from abundance to scarcity.
The programme included the films Soylent Green by Richard Fleischer, 1973 (USA), Perfect Sense by David Mackenzie, 2011 (SCOT), BUGS by Andreas Johnsen, 2016 (DK), Wild Relatives by Jumanna Manna, 2018 (GER), Flux Gourmet by Peter Strickland, 2022 (UK), Family Jewels by Eleonora Endreva & Leo Williams, 2018 (US), Scenes with Beans by Ottó Foky, 1976 (HU) and Babobilicons by Daina Krumins, 1982 (US). Glasgow Seed Library hosted a workshop connected to Scenes with Beans and Wild Relatives under the title Caring for Seeds and in collaboration with the Glasgow Zine Library, there was a selection of food-related zines on display. Curated light snacks and drinks accompanied the screenings.
Cinema: New Phoenix, 138 Niddrie Rd, Glasgow G42 8PR (GAMIS)
Supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and National Lottery funding from the BFI.
Partners: Glasgow Zine Library, Glasgow Food Policy Partnership, Farmerama, MOLD Magazine, Potluck zine, Broccoli Magazine, A&E collective
Photographs by Erika Stevenson
PROGRAMME
Caring for Seeds – Glasgow Seed Library Seed Sorting Workshop
Fri, 25 Nov, 16:00
Why do seeds matter, and how can we care for them?
Join a friendly gathering with Glasgow Seed Library to sort and pack seeds together. We will discuss how we have experienced this past growing season, share tips on easy ways you can store seeds at home and connect these to thoughts on seed and food sovereignty.
Rowan Lear and Alkmini Gkousiari will guide the workshop and bring their seed saving knowledge to our meeting. Come and explore together questions around the future of food, how to sustain seed libraries, and how seed work is a kind of care work.
If you have seeds to deposit in the library, please bring them along – make sure your seed deposits are clearly labelled with the plant variety, your name, where they were grown, and any other observations you want to share.
Then stick around for the 6pm screening; a selection of short films including Scenes with Beans, Family Jewels and others TBA.
:::
Free but ticketed
:::
Glasgow Seed Library is a collection of seeds and a community of growers. The library stocks organic and open-pollinated vegetable, herb and flower seeds for everyone to borrow, grow and save. Throughout the year, Glasgow Seed Library organises free workshops, talks and events around seed saving, community growing and earth care.
Selected Shorts: Scenes with Beans, Family Jewels, Babobilicons, Microbes and Squish!
Fri, 25 Nov, 18:00
SCENES WITH BEANS
by Ottó Foky
1976
12′
EN captions
no age rating
In this stop-motion short, we observe the daily life of the civilisation of beans through the eyes of an observer in space. Using a high-resolution telescope, the metallic chicken watches as the inhabitants of bean planet navigate traffic, go to football games, or fall victim to a burglary. In the scenes, the everyday happenings of urban life in the ‘70s are portrayed as mundane, grotesque, even comical. The animation fittingly uses common household items to create the environment lived in by thousands of anthropomorphised beans – making the animation process last three months in total. The busy rhythm of the short film is often broken up by scenes depicting the calmness of nature in contrast to a robotlike way of living and the space craze of the era.
FAMILY JEWELS
by Eleonora Edreva & Leo Williams
2018
7’
EN captions
no age rating
Have you ever felt parental love towards your sourdough starter? Or your ferment? As these practices require regular care and attention, we often develop a close bond with the jars, give them names and monitor their development. Family Jewels depicts fermentation as a queer parenting practice. The work questions the notion of ‘family’ as a biological unit involving gender binary and sexual reproduction and portrays a couple who have formed a queer family with other life forms. They burp beet kvass, wash the head of cabbage for sauerkraut, and are concerned when something doesn’t look quite right in their symbiotic household.
BABOBILICONS
by Daina Krumins
1982
15’
EN captions
no age rating
Babobilicons is a surrealist stop-motion animation work. Instead of trustworthy objects however, the images are created from organic life forms – Krumins “cultivated slime molds on Quaker Five-Minute Oats in her basement, planted hundreds of phallic stinkhorn mushrooms, and put her mother behind the camera to film them growing.” The dreamlike sequences feature all kinds of mushroom transformations, a swarm of ladybugs, and eerie-looking water creatures juxtaposed with seemingly normal objects doing extraordinary things. The Babobilicons made up of a coffee pot and lobster claws move through the images in a mechanical but curious way while the world around them oozes, turns into mold, peels away, and reassembles itself again.
MICROBES
Julia Darrouy
2020
2’11”
A stop motion film that is a playful take on what happens inside a person’s stomach.
About the artist:
Julia Darrouy is a performance artist, and a maker, who works with both adults and children; their work is rooted in playfulness and imagination.
SQUISH!
by Tulapop Saenjaroen
2021
’17
EN captions
no age rating
Squish! is a meditation on the self through lurid and liquid forms; filtered through both old and foreseeable technology informed by Thai animation history and contemporary culture, and a constant process of constructing and deforming new selves to simulate ‘movements’. By extrapolating and redefining the terms of ‘movement’, be it through psychological, physical or political understandings, the work interweaves the medium of animation with a state of depression.
:::
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Thalia Groucott from Glasgow Food Policy Partnership.
Glasgow Food Policy Partnership
Imagine a truly sustainable food city. A city where everyone can celebrate fresh, seasonal, local, organic and fair trade food that is delicious, healthy and affordable to all. A city that cares about its residents and the planet. This is what Glasgow Food Policy Partnership is working towards. With your help this could be Glasgow; together we can build a greener, healthier community for all of us.
Soylent Green
Fri, Nov 25, 20:00
by Richard Fleischer
1973
97’
EN audio with EN captions
age rating: 14+
In Soylent Green’s vision of the year 2022, Earth is struck with a catastrophe due to overpopulation and climate change. The poor rely on food supplements, while the elite looms over them in high rises. A New York police detective investigates the murder of one such elite: a board member of the Soylent food corporation. The expression ‘greenhouse effect’ was first used in this iconic piece of climate fiction, which typically gets some things right and some not (digital life is not featured in this version of 2022, the main sources of information are books, and the way women are objectified also displays the limitations of the era). The film is set in a future world in which unprocessed food is in very short supply, and people have to pedal exercise bicycles in their homes to generate electricity. Soylent Green is distributed to the rioting population as a ‘high energy vegetable concentrate’, which is nutritious, however tasteless and it might be made of something else than what it says on the label…
Wild Relatives
Sat, 26 Nov, 18:00
by Jumana Manna
2018
64′
Mixed language audio with EN captions
no age rating
Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should a disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide. In 2012 an international agricultural research centre was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.
:::
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Rhia Cook, editor of Potluck zine and Ane Lopez & Lucy Watking from A&E collective.
Potluck is an online and print food magazine all about the importance of cooking, eating and sharing food together. It exists to share the stories from varied contributors who love everything food provides.
https://www.potluckzine.co.uk/
A+E is a group of creatives working in design, film, food and writing, coming together to awaken people’s imaginations and investment in a better World.
Perfect Sense
Sat, Nov 26, 20:00
by David Mackenzie
2011
90′
EN audio with EN captions
age rating: 15+
When people mysteriously start losing their senses due to a new, never-before-seen pandemic, smell and taste are the first to go. This sci-fi follows the catastrophe-induced but powerful romance of a chef (Ewan McGregor) and a virologist (Eva Green), as they are trying to make sense of the events and adapt to the changes. Can society continue to exist without smelling, seeing, or hearing? The film is shot locally in Glasgow – the city’s gloomy atmosphere and its reputation for good (vegan) food set the scene for the chaos that follows. The protagonists are stripped down to the basic, intimate things that make us human: our innate capacity for love and hope that is intrinsically paired with our senses.
BUGS
Sun, Nov 27, 18:00
by Andreas Johnsen
2016
73′
Mixed languages with EN captions
age restriction: 15+
In this documentary, the team of Copenhagen-based Nordic Food Lab, made up of chefs and researchers, is visiting communities in Europe, Australia, Mexico, Kenya, Japan and beyond to explore insect-eating as a culturally accepted practice. Over two billion people on Earth are regularly consuming insects, not just as important sources of protein but as tasty delicacies as well. The team learns about the challenges of farming or foraging for insects as well as cooking routines, unusual flavours, and compelling textures. However, the most pressing questions emerging are not around the top 10 ways to barbecue crickets: discussing the societal inequalities around this emerging branch of the food industry are unavoidable as well as the importance of maintaining the diverse, resilient ecosystems in which such cuisines traditionally thrive.
:::
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Katie Revell from Farmerama.
Farmerama Radio is an award-winning podcast sharing the voices behind regenerative and agroecological farming. Each month, the show features farmers and growers who are rebuilding our food systems from the ground up. By amplifying their voices, the Farmerama team hopes to highlight how crucial their decisions are to the future of our planet – and why we all have a stake in their work. As well as regular monthly episodes, Farmerama has released four special series exploring bread production, food in the Covid pandemic, colonial legacy and land ownership, and the experiences of land-based workers from underrepresented communities.
Flux Gourmet
Sun, Nov 27, 20:00
by Peter Strickland
2022
111′
EN & GR audio with EN captions
age restriction: 15+
An artist collective that manipulates the noise generated during the preparation of food into ASMR performances is developing new work at an artist residency. They do not shy away from using shocking elements (‘being shocked is better than being bored’) and when it turns out that the writer (who is also the film’s comically melancholic narrator) working in the institution is suffering from a persistent case of bloating and intestinal gas, they bring him into the production. As the film progresses, the personal and artistic tensions between them slowly heat this strange world to the point of explosion. The so-called catering band’s existence might seem far from reality, however, the movie is based on the director’s personal life, and his own band in the ‘90s. For him, food is the source of both pleasure and suffering and eating a continuous cycle of intake and purification, a play of filling, gaining and getting rid of the unnecessary.