When Tomatoes Met Wagner

Film Still from "When tomatoes met Wagner"

Is there something in common between the ‘biopolitical potatoes’ of Lebanon and the ‘biophilosophical tomatoes’ of the Thessalian plain? The documentary film “When Tomatoes Met Wagner” (2019 Hellenic Film Academy ‘Iris’ Award for Best Feature Documentary) by Marianna Economou, which is screened after Ziad Antar’s performance-lecture, tries to answer that question. The film is taking us to an almost deserted village of the Thessalian plain. Two male cousins and five village women decide to make a new start, having in mind that each plant deserves its own music. With a little help from Wagner’s music, that they blast in the fields, and the stories they narrate in order to boost themselves, they try to enter the global market by organically growing an old tomato seed.

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Film Still from "When tomatoes met Wagner"

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Film Still from "When tomatoes met Wagner"

Movie description

The Thessalian plain surrounded by mountains has always provided the Greek farmers with food. However, the recent financial crisis has left deep scars in this region as well. In Ilias, a village of 33 inhabitants with neither shops nor schools or priests, a farmer named Christos decides to make a new start and turns to organic tomato cultivation. At the backyard of his cousin’s Alexandros house, five women process the tomatoes by hand and turn them into paste. After centuries of life in an isolated place, the tomato cultivation changes the traditional social fabric and the elderly locals adapt to a new reality. Among the new things they have to get used to is Richard Wagner’s music that Alexandros keeps playing in the fields, as well as the fact that he launches the products in the market using stories and local legends and in doing so he attracts people from across the globe who come to visit the village.

Production: Anemon Productions, Greece 2019, 72΄