Film made in Aubigny sur Nère, Centre and Javouhey region in French Guiana, 8'23, 2013
Music Jean-Christophe Onno
Made thanks to the support of the creation of the DRAC Centre Val de Loire

Documentary views are filmed in Berry and Guyana on two market gardening sites cultivated by representatives of the Hmong ethnic group. Fiction scenes are integrated into it: it retraces the wanderings of two half-man, half-plant characters, symbolizing the adaptation.
These Wilder-männers are making the transition from a pristine natural site to a cultural site. Their almost shamanic profile thus evokes the work of acclimatizing vegetables and fruits to poorly adapted territories. The magical character of the character gives him the power to sow the places he crosses and transform the territories.
In Aubigny-sur-Nère, cultivated vegetables are ingredients of traditional Hmong cuisine, and the confusion over the geographical location of the gardens is total, as the exoticism of the cultures contrasts with the terroir.
In Javouhey, the sites are located near the primary forest, always ready to take back its rights to vegetables. Whatever the sites chosen, the precision and beauty of gardening gestures are always surprisingly delicate.
Continuing their journey, each Wilder -mann takes the road back to the river or the forest, the cross migration of humans and plants continues.

Juliette Cortes, 2013, catalog pass me the salt!

Gardens are our passion for the land. A dream of paradise that was the dream of all orangeries when Versailles fashion reached the richest castles. Gardens are the result of hard work and above all of a passion and fascination for life. A life/death cycle that is repeated from season to season. Karine Bonneval pays tribute to him through the Hmong community, Laotians who came from the plateaus of Southeast Asia during a humanitarian operation led by France in the 1970s. The Hmong were welcomed in the Central Region and Guyana.
Fruits and vegetables have been selected for thousands of years on the banks of rivers and forests. Javouhey is a Burgundian name. The one of a woman who went to French Guiana as a nun to help convicts find their way back into life. On the banks of the majestic Mana, she planted her convent and gardens in total symbiosis with the forest. All vegetables are born from water and land.
Aubigny-sur-Nère, in Sologne, is in the same water-land proximity. The work is done to the rhythm of the river. Time is needed to understand what will come to us in the kitchens.
The side-by-side videos show the interchangeable nature of nature, breaking the idea of the terroir, which turns out to be an archaic myth of a land that provides for human needs. What are called "roots" are imaginary to connect us to this land from which we do not have enough of a life to understand what it can give us. Karine Bonneval likes the idea that people and food products move from one cultural area to another. How are they welcomed? Cultivated? What cuisines are they preparing tomorrow, now that the tropical is acclimatizing to the temperate?
A focus on these two territories of a globalization in progress and that nothing seems to stop.

Gilles Fumey, 2013, catalog pass me the salt!