Foragers, 2022, HD video with sound, 63 minutes, 34 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.
TB2023 cinema program
Jumana Manna is a Berlin-based Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker who explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Her 2022 feature film Foragers uses fiction, documentary, and archival footage to identify a point of tension between the law and a relation to land centered on the wild edible plants ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme). These plants have traditionally been foraged by Palestinians, yet today the State of Israel prohibits their collection, citing the native plants’ scarcity. Hundreds of foragers have been caught and subjected to fines and trials. Foragers delicately explores a quiet violence in conflicting relationships to nature as the legal administration or supposed caretaking of nature clashes with a bodily and historical knowledge of the land as a source of sustenance. The film explores the sensuality of this knowledge as a crucial center of gravity, one with a magnetic power to resist the brutal imposition of abstract laws in the lands claimed by the State of Israel. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee, and Jerusalem, Foragers asks who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.
