DOCUMENTARY ABOUT PELITI

The cultivation of traditional seeds is diminishing more and more in countries all over the world. A movement of global scale has already begun, to preserve seeds as they used to be in the old days. The question is why should we insist on cultivating traditional seeds nowadays?

The answer to this question is given by the Federation of local Associations of Peliti, managed by Panagiotis Sainatoudis and his wife, at the Peliti estate, in Mesochori Paranestiou in Drama. A chance meeting with Panayiotis was the cause to make this film. The research has been done by Yiannis Fragoulis and the direction by Anastasia Christoforidou.

We met at the annual meeting of the Peliti estate, where several hundred people gathered from many parts of Greece, either to give or to receive free seeds. Producers give the seeds they have saved from their own harvest; all are based on the effort of Peliti to maintain traditional Greek farming. A seed bank has been created, lectures are organized, volunteers from Greece and abroad get together, and all this at a incredibly busy festival every Sunday after Easter, each year.

The shooting of the documentary began at this top annual celebration and continued at the regional event in the monastery of St John the Baptist of East Kissavos, at the estate of Nick Loftsali, in Ptolemais, and the estate of George Kipourou, in Serres.

The filming continues in order to complete a documentary film that sees this process as having highly political characteristics, as a proposal of a new lifestyle that changes what is taken for granted in Western societies. Humans have a right to know what they are eating, the source of their food, which carries part of the load of the history of their homeland. It proposes another philosophy which is not based on the frantic consumerism of a western lifestyle, but on the experience that brings humans into balance with nature.