Film Festival 09 - The Neglected Miracle
The Neglected Miracle
New Zealand 1985, 106m
Director: Barry Barclay
When The Neglected Miracle premiered at the Wellington Film
Festival in 1985 few of us knew about the dangers of corporate
'ownership' of genetic crop resources. John O'Shea and Barry
Barclay had already been working on the subject for seven years,
shooting in Peru, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Netherlands, Italy,
France, Australia and New Zealand. Their film is cannily structured
around interviews with peasant farmers who've preserved and
nurtured their corn and potatoes for generations - and whose
closeness to the land is lyrically photographed and evoked in
traditional song. The first-world scientists and businessmen who
appear in the film - most of them landless Dutch - are much more
forthright than their 21st-century successors as they uphold their
rights to treat these resources as intellectual property. This
ground-breaking film remains deeply impressive for its cogent
argument - which, by today's standards, is almost subliminal in its
lack of sound bite stridency - and its poetic, fearful vision of
undefended paradise.
