'Terra Madre' by Ermanno Olmi

'Terra Madre', the last documentary directed by Ermanno Olmi, will be screened at Berlinale Special 2009

Terra Madre is an event organized by Slow Food in Turin, where more than 6,000 farmers, shepherds, fishers and cooks from over 130 countries met and discuss about the global agricultural problems in the world, such as climate change and starvation. Italian film director Ermanno Olmi was in attendance in 2006 and 2008 with several camera crews belonging to Ipotesi Cinema, his "school". Later, the director went to Svalbard Islands (Norway), where European Commission President Jose Barroso and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg opened in 2008 a seed vault – a massive storehouse for food plant seeds that aims to preserve biodiversity in the face of global warming and natural disasters, to Dehradun (Uttarakhand, Northern India), in the environmental activist Vandana Shiva's farm, and to Quarto d'Altino (Italy). For the last part, Olmi was inspired by the book Un uomo senza desideri by Ignazio and Fulvio Roiter.

[video 1 and 2: Vandana Shiva's speech at Terra Madre 2008]