While the documentaries on the issues of ecology and the environment is increasing (as recently The Illusion green of the Austrian Werner Boote), the great argentinian filmmaker Fernando Solanas starts to turn in the fight against Monsanto and the multinational companies with The Grain and the Chaff , dedicated to pope Francis for his encyclical Laudato si . At the age of 83, the old lion has not finished roar.
Born in 1936 in Buenos Aires, he joined from its beginning, cinema and political activism. The movement Cine-
the poster for The documentary. The Grain and the tares
Liberacion, of which he was one of the founders in the early 60’s, wants to make the cinema an instrument of social protest and policy in a country where the only word is that of power. His first major documentary, the Hour of The furnaces, in 1968, filmed clandestinely, is a vast fresco of revolutionary (which ends on the celebration of Che Guevara, it was the fashion, then). Exiled in France during the second military dictatorship (1976-1983), he referred to this uprooting in a very beautiful film, the Tangos, the exile of Gardel (1985), which will be followed by On (1988), the film of the return, with the wounds and the hope. In 2004, Memory in a rampage bears witness to the economic disaster in Argentina after the dictatorship. At the same time, Solanas has a career in politics as member of parliament for the centre-left, today senator. All his works are of vast trips that scrutinize the reality throughout history and the peoples of Latin America.
The Grain and the Chaff is no exception. While he was shooting his film Oro negro , Solanas discovers one of his actresses the situation in the province of Salta, in the north. «Despite the law of protection of the primary forest, deforestation continues, to enable the intensive cultivation of soya, rapeseed, and other grains.» Thousands of hectares have been deforested. And the Indian Wichi, driven out of their land, are «herded like animals», deprived of the fruits of the wild trees from which they fed, exposed to the aerial spraying. The film opens on a landscape of devastation.
Crops polluted
With his energy combative, Fernando Solanas runs through the seven regions of Argentina. In the province of Buenos Aires, two experts in eco-agriculture to denounce the invasion of the soybean massively imposed by Monsanto on millions of acres, that destroyed all the biodiversity and led to the disappearance of countless small farms that were divided between crop and livestock production and allowed people to live on site. There uprooting, unemployment and destruction of all social ties in rural areas. But also serious health problems for those who are exposed to aerial application of toxic. Solanas visit both hospitals as the huge complex oil that ensures the transport and export of transgenic soybeans, or slaughterhouses industrial. «More than 60 % of the vegetables contain of agro-toxic. And the meat is refused by Europe.» The panorama is very dark, but the last chapter, «environmentally friendly alternatives», it adds a note of hope. The resistance to the power of the multinationals is organized little by little.
The Grain and the chaff Documentary by Fernando Solanas. Duration: 1: 37.
» SEE ALSO – Roundup: Monsanto sentenced to 80 million of damages and interest
Roundup : Monsanto sentenced to 80 million of damages and interest – Watching on Figaro Live