Nov. 25, 2011 — Amsterdam

Bitter Seeds won the Green Screen competition Award at IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. Fifteen films competed, of which three were nominated. Earlier, the film had won the Oxfam Global Justice Award (see below).

The competition jury president, Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost), read out the jury’s the reasons for the award:

One film in particular stood out for its skillfulness in weaving together an economic, agricultural and sociological narrative, but above all in telling a number of different human stories. It showed us struggle, but also a possible way of escape. It added up to so much more than the sum of its parts. It was masterful, cinematically rich and it totally grabbed us in the guts. That film is… Bitter Seeds by Micha X. Peled.  A deeply affecting, character-driven film exposing the issues surrounding a rash of farmer suicides in India, BITTER SEEDS masterfully weaves a rich tapestry of compelling human stories and subplots, that allows you to enter a world that is both personal and profound.

Read more on the IDFA website…

BITTER SEEDS AWARDS

• Bitter Seeds Screening at the Newport Beach Film Festival

Bitter Seeds will screen Apr. 28 and Apr. 30 at the Newport Beach Film Festival. For details and tickets go here. 

• Bitter Seeds Screening at Festival Millennium 

Local organization ARC 2020 reports on Bitter Seeds screening in Brussels. 

• BITTER SEEDS TO COMPETE

Bitter Seeds to compete in the Green Warsaw Competition, which will take place during the Planete + Doc film Festival in Warsaw and Wroclaw, Poland, May 11 – 20.

Micha Peled will take part in a debate during the festival on the issues of the film Surviving Progress. For screenings go HERE. 

• Bitter Seeds Screening Announced in India West

 The controversial documentary “Bitter Seeds,” which explores the issue of American-designed genetically modified seeds and their effect on villages across India, will screen during the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival. Continued… 

• Bitter Seeds Official Selection at the Norwegian Documentary Film Festival

  Details and tickets here.  

• Leading Scholar Endorses Bitter Seeds

Dr. Glenn Davis Stone, Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Environmental Studies, Washington University is one of the leading experts in the US on the use of Bt (geneticaly-modified) cotton in India and the author of the seminal study “Field versus Farm in Warangal: Bt Cotton, Higher Yields, and Larger Questions,” which is often cited in academia. Dr. Stone’s reaction to Bitter Seeds: ”This is a close and riveting look at daily life and farmer suicide in one of the most troubled agricultural areas of the world. It follows the collapse of one cotton farmer’s life and farm, as seen through the eyes of a local girl, herself the daughter of a suicide, determined to document the area’s distress. It looks closely at the forces of industrial agriculture that lie behind the inescapable debt that drives farmers to suicide.” Find the study here.

• Bitter Seeds a Finalist at the Green Film Festival in Seoul
  829 Films from 64 different countries were submitted for the South Korean Green Competition. Bitter Seeds was among the 20 finalist films from 11 countries which will be screened at the festival. Details here.
• Bitter Seeds on INT’L WOMEN’S DAY, Mar. 8, 2012
  The sub-plot of the film follows a young village woman in India who is determined to overcome family objections and village traditions and pursue her dream to become a journalist. Recognizing its value for Int’l Women’s Day, the Scottish organization Take One Action will be screening Bitter Seeds in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. Micha Peled will be skyping the Q & A with the audience.
• Bitter Seeds to Travel to Festivals Around the World
  

• Bitter Seeds Wins Oxfam Global Justice Award

Nov. 24, 2011 – Amsterdam

With the Oxfam Global Justice Award, Oxfam recognizes the efforts of people struggling to bring developmental justice to the millions of poor and excluded people around the world. Oxfam hopes that the Global Justice Award will help focus the attention on issues of global concern, such as economic, social and environmental sustainability, livelihoods, global fair trade, empowerment, climate change and poverty resolution.

• BITTER SEEDS INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE, IDFA

The International premiere of Bitter Seeds will take place at IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam, the 16-27th of November.  It will compete in the Green Film competition.

Rounding out his “Globalization Trilogy” with another affecting, character-driven portrait designed to indict corporate opportunism, Micha X. Peled exposes the issues underlying a rash of farmer suicides in “Bitter Seeds.” –Variety 9/5/11

Every 30 minutes a farmer in India kills himself in despair. How is it that a hardworking farmer and father arrives at a point in life where the most sensible course of action is to kill himself by drinking a bottle of pesticide? It all makes horrible sense once you understand the forces at work: the tragic intersection of a high-tech industrial agriculture, the global economy and a traditional culture.

Micha Peled’s vivid, rich and deep new documentary Bitter Seeds takes us to an Indian village at the center of the suicide crisis region. It follows over a season a cotton farmer and his family as they struggle to keep their land, and a teenage girl making her first steps to become a journalist and tell the world about the crisis. Bitter Seeds raises critical questions about the human cost of genetically modified agriculture and the future of how we grow things. This is the third film in Micha Peled’s globalization trilogy, following the award-winning Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town and China Blue.

Films like this can change the world. –Alice Waters

A tragedy for our times, beautifully told and deeply disturbing. –Michael Pollan

Better than a Batman movie… with real villains making up their own lines. –Peter Sellars

Emotional, gripping doc. –Variety 9/5/11

“Our previous film, China Blue, also had its European premiere at IDFA,” says the film’s director and producer, Micha X. Peled. “I can’t think of a better European launch. This is an opportunity to thank our funders:

• Ben & Jerry’s Foundation
• Columbia Foundation
• Fleishhacker Foundation
• Funding Exchange
• Park Foundation
• ITVS (Independent Television Service) with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

• BITTER SEEDS WORLD PREMIERE, Telluride Film Festival

Sept. 1, 2011 – Telluride USA

In a Telluride Film Festival panel event, Micha Peled explained how the broad issues about the future of agriculture were distilled in Bitter Seeds into the kernel of human experience you see on screen.

Truth is crueler than fiction. It would take a mash-up of Kafka, Capote and Poe to invent the bitter storyline herein: an aspiring young journalist tracks the causes of an epidemic of farmers suicides in India… that includes her own father. —Telluride Film Festival program notes

• China Blue Selected for ITVS 20th Anniversary

Aug. ’11 – USA

ITVS is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The Independent Television Service selected 20 of its 1,000 films that “represent the extraordinary contributions of independent filmmakers to public television.” China Blue is among the 20 films. It will air on the ITVS Indies Showcase August 12-14.

Filmmaker Micha X. Peled reveals behind-the-scenes details about the making of the film in a video clip that is posted on YouTube .

There will also be a live chat with Micha, moderated by PBS NewsHour Correspondent Hari Sreenivasan, this Friday, Aug. 12th at 11PST. For all details, go to http://beyondthebox.org/documentary-china-blue-triggers-live-with-pbs-newshour-and-itvs-on-globalization/

• Bitter Seeds Short-listed for IDFA

July ’11 – Amsterdam

The International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam, the world’s premier festival for documentary films, announced that our film, Bitter Seeds, is short-listed for the festival. Final selections will be announced in October.

Bitter Seeds, which follows two families in an Indian village, explores the connection between the farmer’s’ suicide crisis in India and the genetically modified seeds the farmers must use. Currently in post-production, it will be completed by the end of this summer.

• China Blue Austria Deal

Mar. ’11 – Vienna

Teddy Bear Films has just signed an agreement with One World Film Clubs Austria for China Blue to be made available online for educational purposes to Austrian students.

• Lenny Feinstein Hired to Edit Bitter Seeds

Dec. ’10 – Los Angeles

TBF is pleased to announce that we’ve hired editor-extraordinaire Lenny Feinstein to cut the two versions (feature and TV) of Seeds (working title). Work is scheduled to begin next month.

Leonard Feinstein has worked in documentaries for over 30 years. He has edited Emmy award winning programs for National Geographic, Nova, The American Experience, as well as the acclaimed PBS series, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. He was nominated for an American Cinema Editors “Eddie” for the feature documentary Darfur Now, and in 2009 he was awarded an “Eddie” for editing the TV reality series Greensburg. He has frequently collaborated with contemporary artists and has worked on films about Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, and Twyla Tharp.

• Will My Mother…Revival

July ’10 – Berlin

Micha’s first film, Will My Mother Go Back to Berlin? comes out of the archives to screen July 29 at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. When released in 1993, Will My Mother played to sold out theatres and elicited many letters of support and thankful emotion from German, American, and international viewers. Among other awards, Will My Mother won Best Documentary at the International Hawaii Film Festival and Germany’s prestigious Robert Geisendörfer Preis, making Micha Peled the first non-German to do so. The Los Angeles Times venerable movie critic Charles Champlin called it “a hell of a good movie.”

• Iran TV Pays Up

June ’10 – Iran

Finally, 3 years after doing so, Iran State television IRIB has paid up for airing China Blue. We’re proud to be home to one of the few American filmmakers whose work has shown on Iranian TV.

• Our Films on VOD Germany

June ’10 – Germany

China Blue and Store Wars join the online distribution revolution! Both these films are now available on-line on demand from Germany’s Realeyz .

If you do not live in a supported country, see our DVDs page to find out how to obtain a DVD of any of our films directly from us.

Stills FAQs  Reviews  Crew

Bitter Seeds explores the future of how we grow things, weighing in on the worldwide debate over the changes created by industrial agriculture. Companies like the U.S.-based Monsanto claim that their genetically modified (GM) seeds offer the most effective solution to feeding the world’s growing population, but on the ground, many small-scale farmers are losing their land. Nowhere is the situation more desperate than in India, where an epidemic of farmer suicides has claimed over a quarter million lives. Every 30 minutes one farmer in India, deep in debt and unable to provide for his family, commits suicide.

Following a U.S. complaint to the World Trade Organization, India had to open its doors to foreign seed companies. Within a few years, multinational corporations had taken over India’s seed market in a number of major crops. Now only GM seeds are available at the shops, requiring India’s farmers to pay an annual royalty. The GM seeds are much more expensive; they need additional fertilizers and insecticides and must be re-purchased every season. While large farms have prospered, the majority of farmers find it increasingly more difficult to make a living off their land.

Bitter Seeds follows a season in a village at the epicenter of the crisis, from sowing to harvest. Like most of his neighbors, cotton-farmer Ram Krishna must borrow heavily in order to afford the mounting costs of modern farming. Required by a money-lender to put up his land as collateral, he gambles on everything he has.

When his crop is attacked by pests, Ram Krishna must do whatever he can to avoid losing the family land. Adding to his burden is another duty – his daughter has reached marrying age, and he must find the money for an expensive dowry. Ram Krishna has just become a candidate for joining the ranks of the farmers who commit suicide in despair.

Weaving in and out of Ram Krishna’s story is that of his neighbor’s daughter. Manjusha, a college student, is determined to become a journalist and tell the world about the farmers’ predicament. Her family opposes her plans, which go against village traditions. Manjusha’s ambition is also fueled by her personal history – her father was one of the suicide victims. When a newspaper reporter agrees to look at her writing, Manjusha takes on Ram Krishna’s plight as her first reporting project. Armed with a small camera from the production team, her video becomes part of the film.

The film follows the seeds salesmen from the remote village in the state of Maharashtra to their company’s headquarters. Interviews with seed industry executives (including Monsanto’s) and their critic, Vandana Shiva, flesh out the debate.

Bitter Seeds features compelling characters to tell a deeply moving story from the heart of the worldwide controversy about the future of farming.

“Films like this can change the world.” – Alice Waters

“A tragedy for our times, beautifully told, deeply disturbing.” – Michael Pollan

“Better than a Batman movie…with real villains making up their own lines.”  — Peter Sellars

Visit PBS China Blue Site

More Awards…

Like millions before her, Jasmine leaves her Sichuan village to help her family with a job in a far-away factory. There she meets 14-years-old Li Ping, who is already an experienced seamstress. During brief lunch breaks Jasmine watches another co-worker Orchid, who turns their 12-bed dorm room into a disco. These friendships would provide her only solace as Jasmine’s initial excitement soon melts away. The long work hours seven days a week, the merciless fine system and the delays in pay are overwhelming.

Orchid, who specializes in zippers, is the only one with an easier schedule. Later, Orchid uses the New Year holiday to go home after two years away and introduce her boyfriend to her parents, hoping for their approval. Chinese New Year is the only time off the workers get in the entire year, but Jasmine cannot afford yet the expensive two-day trip back.

To get a new order from a promising British buyer, Mr. Lam must agree to extremely low prices and a very tight delivery schedule. For the deal to work, he cuts his workers’ pay and requires them to work around the clock.

While the film shows how our global economic system leaves the Chinese factory owner with few choices, it also explores in detail what that means for the workers. Anxious to avoid getting fined for falling asleep on the job, Jasmine and Li Ping sneak out of the factory to buy energy tea, but they get caught and are fined anyway. Other workers resort to keeping their eyes open by clipping clothespins on their eyelids. When the workers’ endurance reaches a breaking point, their only recourse may be a strike, which is illegal in China.

China Blue paints a nuanced, tender and ultimately moving portrait of the daily lives of the young workers who make our clothes. It also brings an updated and alarming report on the economic pressures applied by Western companies and their human consequences. The Boston Phoenix called it “heartbreaking, truly unforgettable” and Variety commented that “the Pic’s degree of access and intimacy is surprising. Indeed, after you get to know Jasmine and Li Ping, shopping will never be the same.

The film was made without permission from the Chinese authorities. During production the crew was stopped by the police numerous times. On one occasion the crew was arrested and interrogated. Tapes were confiscated and never returned, despite inquiries by the American consulate.

This 87-minute feature documentary was produced and directed by Micha X. Peled. Peled’s last film for PBS was Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town. Explored the consumer end of the same issue of the impact of global retail on individual lives. China Blue is a co-production of Teddy Bear Films in San Francisco and the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in association with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). It was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Sundance Documentary Fund.

Stills Press Quotes Awards Crew

Visit the PBS Store Wars site

This is the story of Ashland, VA, population 7200, where the grocery store allows charge accounts and the doctor makes house calls. School bus drivers and morticians serve on the Town Council and residents are fiercely proud of their small-town character. Now, this gentle way of life is jolted by the prospect of a Wal-Mart supercenter on the edge of town.

Store Wars follows events in Ashland over a one-year period, from the first stormy public hearing that galvanizes residents’ opposition till the Town Council takes a final vote on the proposed Wal-Mart store. Arguments for the store (tax revenues, low prices, jobs) and against it (destroys small town character, traffic, low-end jobs) are articulated and hotly debated. The cast of characters includes the mayor and Town Council members who will eventually make the decision, Wal-Mart representatives and the “Pink Flamingos,” the grassroots citizen group opposed to the store.

Between episodes in the town, sequences shot elsewhere introduce Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, the largest employer in the U.S. and a truly global company. The famous Wal-Mart cheer, chanted enthusiastically by hourly associates and top executives alike, gives voice to the company’s dynamic spirit. The company’s labor standards and its cultural censorship practices are explored.

The protracted conflict is staged in two rounds. After being turned down the first time, Wal-Mart comes back with a more generous proposal. It also mounts a PR campaign of full-page ads in the local press and television commercials. The Flamingos hold street demonstrations with “No Sprawl Y’All” signs. The town council is divided and accusations fly back and forth.

The final decision takes place in a tumultuous Town Council meeting which lasts way past midnight one year after the first public hearing took place. The outcome will determine whether Store Wars is a story about the triumph of a determined group of citizens, or a parable of our times about the inevitable expansion of a truly global corporation.

Store Wars does not single out Wal-Mart, but rather highlights its position as the icon of the Big Box industry. While offering a critical view of this industry, the film presents fairly all viewpoints on this controversial issue.