Plants have long offered filmmakers ways of thinking through longing, memory, resistance, and power in different political contexts and through diverse cinematic formats. The film programme consists of eight short and medium-length films that were produced over the last seventy years, blending various chronologies and traditions from film history, such as lyrical cinema, queer experimental film, militant documentary, experimental fiction and essay film.
Several works in the selection explore how moving image artists have depicted the expression of desire through plants: a gardener tending to beauty as a subtle act of resistance; an artist cutting a mango in different ways to express longing for home; interpretations of the mythical metamorphosis of a female body that becomes a laurel tree instead of submitting to a god’s grasp; and female lovers and friends photographed among blooming fruits and vegetables. Other selected films discuss appropriation and violence: a colonial archive of wildflowers reclaimed from the institution that filmed them, a plantation’s afterlife replayed as a fever dream, three thousand striking women employees of a tobacco factory, and a landscape brutally laid bare through the surveillance of the everyday.
Curated by Danai Anagnostou, the programme unfolds as follows:
Surveilling a Crime Scene by Alana Hunt (Australia/ Miriwoong Country, 2023)
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing by Theo Panagopoulos (UK, 2024)
Women I Love by Barbara Hammer (USA, 1976)
Daphne was a Torso Ending in Leaves by Catriona Gallagher (Italy/ Greece/ UK, 2024)
Tobacco Embers by Yugantar Collective (India, 1982)
Plantation Tragedy by Elia Nurvista (Indonesia, 2026)
How to Eat a Mango by AK Wane (Senegal/ Finland, 2024)
Sapovnela (Song about a flower) by Otar Iosseliani (USSR, 1959)
Follow the Plants x Kenno Filmi film program
28 Aug 2026 11:00 — 14:00
Location: Cinema Orion
Book your ticket here.
This event is a collaboration between Bioart Society, Food Art Research Network, Kenno Filmi and Cinema Orion.
Danai Anagnostou’s contribution has been supported by AVEK, Mediarata 2026. Barbara Hammer’s film is Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer, New York and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
More information: https://bioartsociety.fi/projects/follow-the-plants/activities/follow-the-plants-x-kenno-filmi-film-program