Seeds of Freedom
Seed sits at the center of this film's story, tracked from small farms where communities bred thousands of local varieties for taste, climate, and soil, to the handful of corporations that now control much of the world's commercial seed supply. The film follows how patents, hybrid seed, and genetically modified crops shifted seed from something farmers saved and traded freely into a product they must buy every season, often from the same company that sells the pesticides meant to work with it. Farmers in Africa, India, and Latin America describe what happens to local diets and soil when generations of saved varieties are replaced by a few uniform strains. Produced with the African Biodiversity Network, MELCA Ethiopia, Navdanya International, and GRAIN, the film sets industrial monoculture against traditional polyculture and argues that biodiversity, not consolidation, is what will actually feed a growing population. It closes on farmer-led seed banks and exchanges as the practical alternative already being built in the fields it just showed collapsing elsewhere.