Press Release for Byron Bay Film Festival
With the 2011 Byron Bay Film Festival (BBFF) is kicking off this week, spanning 4 – 13 March it's time to start planning your festival. The program is packed with tonnes of brilliant local & international independent films including the socially inspiring documentary Ciclovida.
Ciclovida: Lifecycle pedals alongside a group of Brazilian subsistence farmers who bicycle almost 10,000 kilometres across the South American continent in search of natural seeds. With practically no money or support crew, they rely entirely on their resourcefulness and the solidarity of people they meet along the way. They carry with them only the simplest of necessities, their radical ideas and philosophy, collected seeds, and a video camera.
The main characters, Inacio and Ivania, identify themselves as farmers, poets, musicians, and activists for ecological and social justice. Their choice of transportation for this trip comes from their philosophy of having respectful relations with the Earth and its people. The need to gather naturally reproducing seeds, and to create networks for future sharing of ideas and seeds, is the motivation for their journey. They seek to gather and disseminate thousands of seeds, a wealth of knowledge, and contribute to an invaluable network amongst small agricultural communities of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina; all without the use of oil or biofuels.
The underlying pressures of industrial agriculture, with a focus on biofuel crops, are explored, including the historical groundwork that was laid by the old imperial governments. Land struggle movements are delineated, as are the reasons that farmers feel compelled to turn their backs on subsistence agriculture and convert to mono-crops. In particular this film intimately portrays the economic and ecological impacts of such farming practices and their implicit uses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and genetically modified seeds.
This stirring narrative will captivate its audience while it unflinchingly conveys the disturbing ecological, economic, and social impacts of large agribusiness practices. It portrays an alternative to the biofuel monocultures that threaten all small farmers as the cycling farmers successfully inspire significant and sustainable change.
Made up of moving stories from landless peasants, indigenous communities, and small farmers, this feature length documentary exposes the devastating effects of industrial agriculture. Visit www.bbff.com.au for all the details and tickets.
SCREENING DETAILS – Sunday 6 March 2011