A film by Maria Gabriela Carucci
Produced by Huma Gupta
Executive Producers:
Mahwish Khalil
Meitha Al Mazrooei
Giulia Carucci
Gino Carucci
Supported by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT
A Climate Futures, Cities Past Production
The film begins on an early morning in March in the small Italian municipality of Caggiano, in the region of Campania in the Italian Apennines. The film introduces the filmmaker’s grandmother who is an immigrant that returns to Caggiano, and lives alone. She becomes the window through which three other women are introduced, who all have different connections to the land. Anthropogenic systems o f food production, such as the standardization of seeds, have slowly created voids in what once was a multigenerational understanding of the land and food, and depopulation and the economic marginalization of the urban periphery have induced a progressive land abandonment in agricultural and pastoral districts. Grazing land, once abandoned, increases the risk of soil erosion and unleashes a series of events: water is not absorbed during the rainy season, which produces
landslides in the winter, and the dry springs in the summer means no water for crops, and wildfires in the abandoned lots. Together, the women and the town hope to convey a sense of urgency about the cyclical damage to the land and the looming risks of depopulation and the degeneration of the landscape, and to beg a reflection on the bigger issue of our own relationship to “nature” in the era of the Anthropocene.
Read more about the film making workshop: https://jaeonline.org/issue-article/may-our-egos-die-so-that-the-world-may-live/
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