Food what? Looking for food Sovereignty in Barbados

This documentary film is one of the outcomes of over two years of research on the food system of Barbados. Motivated by the multiple crises affecting the island since 2020, the aim of this study was to discuss the potential of the tenets of food sovereignty for Barbados, where the movement is mostly unheard of, obscured by a forced focus on food security. While food security ensures that people are fed, it avoids questions on how the food is produced, and to whom it profits. Beyond a written report, this project sought to give a voice to the local consumers, farmers, distributors, officials and experts about what kind of changes they wish for in their food system. The film also hopes to be a tool for further discussion on our problematic relationships to food, both in the Caribbean and in other regions of the world.

Year: 2023

Runtime: 40 minutes

Language: English

Country: Barbados

Premiere: Grenada

Cloé Fortin

Director

Cloé Fortin
Writer
Cloé Fortin
Producer

Director Biography - Cloé Fortin

Cloe's varied interests and passionate devotion have sent her in many different directions. Torn between literary, visual, culinary and musical arts, she avoided art school as she would have had to focus one of these disciplines. Motivated by the crises and privileged modes of communication of our times, she graduated in video production and environmental geography, with the hope to eventually use the arts to help understand the crises. After a successful solo exhibit of her photography project Terre urbaine in 2018 (https://cloegreen.com/portfolio/terre-urbaine/), she continued using photography to document her fieldwork in geography (https://cloegreen.com/portfolio/nunavik/). Identifying our broken relationships to space and time as the main cause of the crises we face, her research methods (drawing analysis, mental mapping, film) sit at the nexus between arts and science (https://geoweb.lemig.umontreal.ca/geolibre/index.php/2022/02/03/landcamp-mettre-les-pieds-sur-la-carte-2/).
Finding herself in the Caribbean after another winding turn in her career and personal life, her latest project is a film observing the relationships to food and the land on the small island of Barbados, where colonial forces violently shaped a problematic perspective on resources and identity. Recognizing similar processes reproducing themselves in the post-colonial era, from her home region to many peripheral regions of the world, she is eager to communicate her findings through artistic expression.

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