The Green Vein
Title: The Green Vein
Directed by
Sara De Sousa Correia
Country: Portugal
Duration: 1hr 30 mins
SYNOPSIS
For centuries, the great empires of West Africa were fed by rivers like the Volta or the Niger – their blue veins.
Today, after decades of colonisation, the food resilience of the banks of these rivers is at risk, and endogenous culture is being lost to an increasingly urban and violently industrialised transitional society.
Nigeria tells us how far this boat can sink through the voice of Dr Beatrice, but on the banks of the Niger, in Mali, that a first answer comes to us.
“My first contact with farming was through the internet” Ousmane, a former footballer who swapped football pitches for other fields, tells us.
Farmers poisoned by pesticides are a constant in Burkina Faso, triggering the search for alternatives are sought by partnerships between scientists and farmers.
In the urban periphery children learn a taste for planting. In Ghana students and researchers seek to value endogenous culture and recover local food sovereignty.
Members of the Rastafari community feel the call to care for the health of the land and people.
“This is the moment of the African Renaissance” argues Godfrey Namudjo, founder of Songhai, a worldwide recognized agroecological training centre in Benin.
A stream of awareness, ideas and initiatives flows and grows across West Africa like a powerful green vein fertilising the land.
The film introduces us loosely to several of the core people raising up this movement.
Directors’ Bio
Sara De Sousa Correia
Independent film director and artist whose work emerges from temporal paradoxes of the rural landscape, present in documentary and video art (“Bruxia” 2011; “Dela reverdecerá” 2018). Her first feature documentary film, “Hortas Di Pobreza” (68′) Guinea-Bissau, 2010, about the dependence of tribal farmers on the export market received a prize for best Lusophone film (Festin, 2011). It currently produces and directs SEED ACT, and in 2015 premiered the first episode of five “Act I: Harvest to Sow” (17′). “Raquel” (2018), winner of Vista Curta Festival was her first docufictional short film. Just directed The Green Vein: the agroecological renaissance of west Africa (2021, West africa documentary) and the short musical doc Colheita (in Brasil, 2021)
Director's Statement
Agroecology is the greatest hope for the rise up of West African countries, supporting a way out of poverty, sickness, desertification and climate change disaster. This film portrays many of the voices that are part of a growing web and peoples movement, and they include dedicated to soil science research, peasant movements, food sovereignty activists and pan africanistists.
I’ve been a long term food sovereignty activist and very connected to West Africa, from where my ancestral roots have place.
I felt a strong drive to make a film that could inspire, connect the movement in these countries, and hopefully serve the future of the land and nature.
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