The film “Des savoirs de la terre” (Knowledge from the earth) questions our relationship with the living world through the traditional uses of plants, which are food, remedies or spiritual protectors. Cape Verdean inhabitants and two ethnobotanists from the Occitane region testify to the links they have with plants through local rituals and gathering practices before alerting us to the disappearance of this cultural heritage. This documentary calls on us to reappropriate confiscated local knowledge in order to rethink our way of living in our territory.
Director: Lola Keraron , Anne Ratsimba
Runtime: 26 minutes 28 seconds
Country of Origin: France
Country of Filming: Cape Verde, France
Language: French, Portuguese
Subtitles: English
Lola Keraron
Lola Keraron is an AgroParisTech engineer, specialised in politcal ecology and director of the documentary series PAMacée. She became interested in medicinal plants when she entered engineering school. She joined a student project that took her to Senegal to train women in the cultvaton of annual mugwort, a plant with ant-malarial propertes. In 2019, as part of a year’s break, she and another agronomy student are creatng a web series enttled PAMacée with the aim of questoning our Western concepton of health and revaluing local knowledge about medicinal plants.
In a concern for ecological coherence, the apprentce director embarked on a sailing boat to Senegal and the health crisis led her to stay in Cape Verde for four months. She lived with local people and interviewed farmers, therapists, doctors and breeders who treat people with plants. On her return to France, she fnished her studies and trained as a journalist with the independent media Bastamag, which is commited to ecological and social issues. Since October 2021, she has dedicated herself to the directon and producton of the PAMacée series and to other ecological commitments.