Wild Relatives

The starting point of Wild Relatives is  an event that  sparked worldwide media interest: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Global Seed Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of the seeds from the Arctic to Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives caught between these two distant spots of the earth.

Jumana Mannais a Berlin-based visual artist working primarily with film and sculpture. She was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012 and the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts in 2017. Her work has been shown in various film festivals and exhibitions.

Philip Widmann makes films, texts, and film programmes at the intersection of experimental documentary cinema, science, and visual art. His film and video work has been shown in various film festivals and art spaces, including Berlinale, IFF Rotterdam, New York FF, Yamagata International Documentary FF, FID Marseille, Videonale Bonn, Wexner Center for the Arts, and others. He has also selected film programmes for Arkipel Jakarta, Image Forum Tokyo, Kassel Dokfest and others. Philip has been a member of LaborBerlin since 2009.