Film Program Planetary Peasants

“When Farmer Meyer is out in the fields, his wife tends the cattle, feeds the pigs and milks the cows. Grandparents and children have to pitch in, too. There are no holidays. If one family member falls ill, their entire livelihood is at risk.” With stark clarity, the 1975 documentary Die Enteignung (‘The Expropriation’) by Jörg Gfrörer, Wolfgang Jung and Walter Krieg lays bare the struggle for survival faced by small farmers in West Germany during the 1970s. Together with Volker Koepp’s Haus und Hof (‘House and Farm’, 1980), which portrays the challenges presented by land brought under cultivation in East German crop farming, Die Enteignung forms the historical starting point of the Planetary Peasants film programme. The four films explore the relationship between rural and industrialized agriculture through a lens focused on specific people and places. Bauer unser (‘Our Farmer’, 2016) by Robert Schabus sheds light on the impact of today’s globalized trade in feed and food using the example of several Austrian farms. Moving beyond economic contexts, Angela Anderson’s Three (or more) Ecologies: A Feminist Articulation of Eco-Intersectionality – Part I: For the World to Live, Patriarchy Must Die (2019) draws a connection between environmental exploitation – such as shale oil fracking on Indigenous land in the USA – and sustainable cultivation practices in an autonomous women’s farming collective in Syrian Kurdistan. The result is a powerful plea for a fundamental transformation in the use of natural resources and the social fabric of our societies.