The Fruit Hunters
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A journey through culture, history and ecology in search of the world of fruit in the company of horticulturists, pomologists and enthusiasts. Yung Chang guides us on a veritable odyssey around the world in pursuit of the Bali white mango and the rare Borneo kura-kura durian, not to mention now extinct Italian figs visible only in Renaissance paintings, the Rare Fruit Council International of the Mango Festival in Miami, Florida, the banana trade in Honduras, and Bill Pullman, who unveils his dream of creating an orchard in Hollywood. The film is inspired by the book of the same name by Adam Leith-Gollner.
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About the Movie The Fruit Hunters
It is not only animals that grow extinct: precious plants and fruit varieties are disappearing from our daily lives and our planet because they have been neglected, eradicated, spurned and no longer cultivated for mere commercial interests.
One woman in Umbria decided to salvage what she could and is now constantly on the lookout for fruits and plants we cannot afford to lose. Isabella Dalla Ragone, an agronomist and self-styled “fruit archaeologist,” aims to hunt down and protect plants that are disappearing. To date she has managed to find at least 500 varieties and to plant them in her garden, her “orchard collection,” which now boasts 440 plants, among which the Florentine pear, the asinaccio fig and the Cornelian cherry.
In 2012 the director Yung Chang dedicated The Fruit Hunters to her and her father. It is not only a question of uncovering heirloom tree species in old gardens, convents and other protected places but of reconstructing their history and rediscovering proper cultivation methods and popular knowledge about them. Above all, it is a question of seeking out fruits and vegetables that graced tables for centuries but that we can now only see in period paintings, or hear about from the few elderly farmers left who still remember them. The economic interests of the industrial age and mass cultivation have gradually led to a decrease in the number of varieties and an increasingly limited selection thereof, especially of the most delicate ones, unsuited to the frenetic “long-life” lifestyle of today.
Isabella’s work is supported by bodies such as FAO, Biodiversity International and the University of Perugia, which created the Fondazione Archeologia Arborea. The project has proved a success and has been sponsored by the likes of actors Bill Pullman, Gerard Depardieu and Anna Galiena, all convinced of the need to save and preserve not only the genetic inheritance of the plants but also traditional knowledge and rural culture, without which it is impossible to imagine a sustainable future. (www.eHabitat.it)
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Creative Europe Media Program. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.