Thursday, March 13, 7 pm

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Join us for a screening of Chitrangada Choudhury & Aniket Aga’s Seed Stories (42 minutes, 2024), followed by a discussion with filmmaker and SUNY Buffalo Department of Geography Associate Professor Aniket Aga! There will be catering with vegetarian options by Ali Baba Kebab.

In a village in the Niyamgiri mountains of Odisha’s Eastern Ghats, a heroic effort is underway: barefoot ecologist Dr. Debal Deb and his 3 member-team are conserving in-situ over 1000 endangered heirloom varieties of rice. Odisha’s Eastern Ghats region is one of the world’s surviving biodiversity hotspots, with Adivasi communities like the Kondhs possessing the knowledge of growing multiple crops with their folk seeds, evolved over centuries. At the same time, the village and the wider region is irreversibly changing with the coming of genetically modified cotton seeds and associated chemicals. Seed Stories takes a worm’s eye view of how this is reshaping a geography and a people steeped in agro-ecological knowledge, and altering their attitudes towards farming, food and ecology. It invites audiences to reflect on the question, “What is sustainability?”

Official Selection: Kolkata People’s Film Festival, Chennai International Documentary & Short Film Festival, Festival delle Terre, Rome,  Give Peace A Screen, Torino Other Screenings: Vikalp@Prithvi – Films for Freedom, Mumbai; India International Centre, Delhi; National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru;  Bengaluru International Center; Museum of Goa. Click here to read a review of the film American Anthropologist.

Attendees: Squeaky Wheel is located in Suite 310 of Tri-Main Center. Take the elevator to the third floor, and head left. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. Click here to see parking, transportation, and accessibility information.

This program is presented and funded by UB Department of Geography, UB Asia Research Institute, UB Center for Global Health Equity, UB Department of Indigenous Studies, UB Food Lab, UB Critical Ecologies Research Collaborative.

Biographies of the filmmakers

Chitrangada Choudhury is a journalist, filmmaker and PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Zurich. Her reportage on the environment and social justice has been cited for multiple awards including the Sanskriti Foundation Award, the Press Council of India’s National Award for Investigative Reporting, and the Lorenzo NataliJournalism Prize twice. She has been on the founding team of The People’s Archive of Rural India and is on the Editorial Board of Article 14 – two award-winning digital publications. Her research has appeared in journals and edited volumes including Elementa – Science of the Anthropocene, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Economic & Political Weekly, and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Aniket Aga is Assistant Professor of Geography at SUNY Buffalo. the author of Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India (Yale University Press, 2021) which won the 2022 Fleck Best Book Prize from the international Society for the Social Studies of Science. His research lies at the intersection of science and technology, development and democracy. His article on pesticide marketing and caste, published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, won the 2019-20 Krishna Bharadwaj-Eric Wolf Prize from the journal.