PERUVIAN DOCUMENTARY EXPLORES QUECHUA CULTURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Sounds and Colours
Photo: Álvaro and Diego Sarmiento
By Ingrid de Almeida | 12 August, 2021
The documentary Mothers of the Land is as an eye-opening report on the threats to Quechua culture posed by capitalism and climate change. The film expresses these risks and challenges through patiently focusing on the everyday, traditional way of life of female farmers in Cusco and Puno, demonstrating just how much effort and time goes into cultivating native crops. Article originally published via Latin American Bureau.
Sembradoras de Vida, the award-winning documentary by Álvaro and Diego Sarmiento, documentarists of Quechua origin, is a beautiful and eye-opening observational film. It manages to tell an alarming story of the threats of capitalism and climate change, through the calm and poised demeanour of the Quechua women at its heart.
The film follows five Andean women farmers in southeastern Peru, in scenes of everyday agricultural life. We see the women planting from dawn to dusk, chewing on coca leaves for energy and engaging in everyday rituals.
The beautiful establishing shots of green and coffee-brown hills, placid lakes and dwellings sprinkled among the valleys, show just how remote and isolated the land is. Local farmers are mostly self-sufficient and thus native crops like corn, quinoa, potatoes are central to the way they live.
More:
https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/peru/peruvian-documentary-explores-quechua-culture-and-climate-change-61822/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Really looking forward to hearing more about the ancient cultures as modern technology creates new ways to study and learn about the indigenous beginnings of human culture there. So much to learn about the past from the future.
Found an interesting article on Peru's amazing global food staple:
How the Potato Changed the World
Brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish explorers, the lowly potato gave rise to modern industrial agriculture
Although the potato is now associated with industrial-scale monoculture, the International Potato Center in Peru has preserved almost 5,000 varieties. (Martin Mejia / AP Images)
By Charles C. Mann
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | SUBSCRIBE
NOVEMBER 2011
When potato plants bloom, they send up five-lobed flowers that spangle fields like fat purple stars. By some accounts, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. Her husband, Louis XVI, put one in his buttonhole, inspiring a brief vogue in which the French aristocracy swanned around with potato plants on their clothes. The flowers were part of an attempt to persuade French farmers to plant and French diners to eat this strange new species.
Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. But in the 18th century the tuber was a startling novelty, frightening to some, bewildering to others—part of a global ecological convulsion set off by Christopher Columbus.
About 250 million years ago, the world consisted of a single giant landmass now known as Pangaea. Geological forces broke Pangaea apart, creating the continents and hemispheres familiar today. Over the eons, the separate corners of the earth developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Columbus’ voyages reknit the seams of Pangaea, to borrow a phrase from Alfred W. Crosby, the historian who first described this process. In what Crosby called the Columbian Exchange, the world’s long-separate ecosystems abruptly collided and mixed in a biological bedlam that underlies much of the history we learn in school. The potato flower in Louis XVI’s buttonhole, a species that had crossed the Atlantic from Peru, was both an emblem of the Columbian Exchange and one of its most important aspects.
Compared with grains, tubers are inherently more productive. If the head of a wheat or rice plant grows too big, the plant will fall over, with fatal results. Growing underground, tubers are not limited by the rest of the plant. In 2008 a Lebanese farmer dug up a potato that weighed nearly 25 pounds. It was bigger than his head.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/
~ ~ ~
Will be hoping to see the film whose trailer you located. Sure looks like some time well spent for anyone who sees it.