Wild Relatives

Q&A with Jumana Manna

Following her debut feature, A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (Art of the Real 2016), Jumana Manna has created a profound meditation on resilience in an era defined by displacement, climate change, and war. Wild Relatives documents the complex pathway of seed distribution between Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and the Global Seed Vault deep inside Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Manna’s beautifully photographed, itinerant documentary starts in the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)—a Lebanon-based gene bank of unique landraces and cereals, headquartered in Aleppo until 2012—and weaves through an intricate network of genealogists, refugees, farmers, and depositors as they safeguard endangered seeds through traditional and innovative agricultural methods. North American Premiere