Virgin and Extra: The Land of the Olive Oil (film review)

 


This fascinating documentary explores the history and heritage of olive oil in Jaén, which produces almost half of Spain's olive oil. The film shines a light on the complexity of the product, the diversity of its flavours and colours, the varied ways it is used in cooking, together with its status as a superfood and many recognised health benefits. 

Watching the film, I was astonished by how much of the area is covered in olive groves, extending seemingly forever. Some of them are quite bare of other vegetation, but a couple of interviewees in the film described their concerns for biodiversity and how some of the farms at least are working to increase their biodiversity with ground cover crops. 

Virgin and Extra Virgin olive oils are in themselves relatively new products and it was interesting to watch the competition to find the best oil and hear the judges talk about how many more great oils there are these days than there used to be. Also interesting to see the olives actually being processed into oil. Virgin and extra virgin oils are extracted mechanically and don't contain additives, which mean they are tastier and healthier than other oils. 

Since reading this article I've become very concerned about how olives are harvested, as some of the mechanical methods result in the deaths of large numbers of birds. So I was watching this film very carefully to see how the olives were actually harvested and it seems that in the featured farms at least, the olives are picked mostly by hand with mechanisation used only to transport them. If you want to source a bird friendly olive oil (edited to add, my blogpost on this topic is now up here) you may want to do more research on this, but Jaen based The Green Gold Olive Oil Company certainly harvests its olives manually. 

Virgin and Extra is definitely an interesting film for foodies and you may even pick up some ideas for delicious recipes from some of the featured chefs!

Virgin and Extra is screening as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019 at 1540, Saturday 22 June and at 1310 Sunday 23 June, both at Odeon Lothian Road. You can book tickets here.

If you're interested in the role of olive trees in agriculture and culture then you may also be interested in The Olive Tree, screening as part of the Spanish strand at this years Edinburgh International Film Festival. I saw this excellent and moving film when it was first shown at the festival in 2016. You can read my review here.  

 

The Olive Tree is screening as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival at 1800, Saturday 29 June at Odeon Lothian Road. You can buy tickets here. 

You can read my earlier reviews from Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019, by following the links below:

Boyz in the Wood a group of teenage boys get lost in the Scottish Highlands.

2040 - can technology offer solutions to our current climate and ecological crises?

 Bait - Cornish fishermen try to adapt to a changing world

How to Fake  a War (on my Shapeshifting Green blog) what happens when a rock star decides to meddle in international affairs?

Farm Animals on Film - featuring The Biggest Little Farm - an inspiring story of the creation of a sustainable biodiverse farm in California, plus Vulture, an experimental film about farm animals.

Disclaimer: I have a press pass for the film festival and attended a free press screening of these films.

 

Farm Animals on Screen at the Edinburgh International Film Festival

The Biggest Little Farm 

Los Angeles couple, John and Molly Chester, give up city life and buy a farm where they aim to grow every ingredient they might use in their kitchen and give their dog Todd the outdoor life he so obviously craves.  

The Biggest Little Farm follows the family’s own story as they address the practical challenges of starting a sustainable, biodiverse farm on 200 acres of barren land. At the beginning of the film Molly can barely put a spade into the soil it is so dry and compacted, by the end of the film the soil is rich and dark and full of the microorganisms that make for a living and healthy soil to grow crops. 

The challenges are many (including drought, wildfires, floods and pests), but the Chesters are ambitious and determined and have a great helper in Alan, an expert in sustainable agriculture and an international team of volunteers. Alan helps them to plan and plant a large orchard containing various varieties of fruit trees. He advises them on livestock farming, which will not only produce food to sell, but which will also through dung production improve the quality of the soils.

The ground in the orchard is planted with ground cover plants, which offer food for the farm animals (who, remember, are fertilising the soil) and which also enable the soil to absorb rain waters (in an excessive rain storm, all the sorrounding farms lose topsoil in the floods, but the Chesters land is fine and the rain that the plants can't use filters through to their underwater aquifer, which allows them to water their crops in dry times).

As the farm is organic, the most persistant problem is what to do with pests. Alan the agricultural advisor (who died during the time of making the film) had said that everything would balance out eventually but at times it seemed this was never going to happen. But eventually listening to Alan and watching how Todd the dog seemed to observe everything so carefully, the Chesters found ways to deal with pests, including taking the chickens into the orchard to eat the snails and encouraging birds of prey onto their land to control the gopher populations. They even learned to live in some degree of balance with the troublesome coyotes. 

This is a wonderful film, a moving story of one family's journey to fulfil their dream and an inspiring tale of how farming in balance with nature can have amazing effects in regenerating the land. It's an ideal film for young people to watch to learn about sustainable farming.

 The Chester's farm Apricot Lane Farms is a biodynamic and regenerative farm. Regenerative farming is one of the themes of the film 2040, also screening in this year's film festival, which I reviewed here.

The Biggest Little Farm is screening as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019 at 1530, Saturday 22 June at Odeon Lothian Road and 2040 Monday 24 June at Vue Omni Centre. You can book tickets here.  

**

Vulture 

 

Screening as part of the Black Box strand of experimental films, Vulture is a visual meditation on farming as a dying way of life, intercut with scenes of a flying vulture with a child's voice over about vultures (the only spoken words in the film). This film was shot and processed with various means including flower and plant processing carried out as blooming occurred. So the pictures seem faded and distressed, giving a sense of things fading away.


Vulture is screening as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019 at: 2030, Friday 21 June and 2015 Thursday 27 June, both at Filmhouse. You can buy tickets here.



You can read my earlier reviews from Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019, by following the links below:

Boyz in the Wood a group of teenage boys get lost in the Scottish Highlands.

2040 - can technology offer solutions to our current climate and ecological crises?

Bait - Cornish fishermen try to adapt to a changing world

How to Fake  a War (on my Shapeshifting Green blog) what happens when a rock star decides to meddle in international affairs?

Disclaimer: I have a press pass for the film festival and attended free press screenings of these films.

Bait - film review

Cornish fishermen Martin (Edward Rowe) and his brother Steven (Giles King) take different approaches to the decline of fish stocks and the ever increasing number of tourists. Steven has commandeered their family boat for tourist cruises, while Martin. too proud to work for tourists, ekes a subsistence income from fishing without a boat, while saving up to buy a new boat. Their family home has been sold to Londoners who now manage the entire row of harbour front cottages as holiday homes. Things are complicated by Steven's son starting a relationship with the daughter of the new owners of his father's childhood home.

Tensions between locals and tourists escalate, with each side believing they are the real community of the place. These tensions then feed into the relationships between the locals, with their disagreements about whether to stick stubbornly to the old lifestyles or to embrace the tourists. Can a middle way be found that respects tradition while welcoming the new sources of income and community? The various levels of conflict combined make this a totally engrossing film.

The film was shot with an old Bolex camera in grainy, atmospheric black-and-white 16mm and hand-processed by Jenkin, which produces a real sense of history, though the radio news about Brexit places the drama firmly in the present day (Cornwall voted by 56% to leave the European Union in the referendum).



Bait is nominated for the 2019 Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film and is screening as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019 at  2045, Friday 21 June at Odeon Lothian Road and at 1520, Sunday 23 June at Vue Omni Centre. You can buy tickets here.

**

You can read all my reviews from Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019, by following the links below:

Boyz in the Wood a group of teenage boys get lost in the Scottish Highlands.

2040 - can technology offer solutions to our current climate and ecological crises?

How to Fake a War (on my Shapeshifting Green blog) what happens when a rock start tries to meddle in world affairs


Disclaimer: I have a press pass for the film festival and attended a free press screening of these films.

2040 - Film Review

The documentary 2040 is director Damon Gameau's visual letter to his four-year-old daughter, to show how technological advances might shape the future world she will live in. The film uses some excellent visual effects to bring alive statistics and abstract ideas (such as Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics). Gameau also travels around the world to investigate practices and techniques that are currently in use somewhere in the world and which on a bigger scale could offer realistic practical solutions to our current climate and ecological crisis.

Solutions investigated in the film include:

Marine Permaculture whereby seaweeds are planted in the oceans and used as food source for us, habitat for fish and carbon sink to take excess carbon out of the water;

Replacing privately owned cars with shared transport options and repurposing car parks into urban farms;

Regenerative agriculture combining an emphasis on growing crops for human consumption with allowing free range animals to feed on a natural diet and give back natural fertilisers to the soil with a no till philosophy;

Educating girls and young women and preventing early marriage so that women have children only when they are ready for them, thus reducing the world population without coercion;

Decentralised electrical grids based on individual households owning solar panels and sharing their electricity with their neighbours. This is already happening in Bangladesh and was the most inspiring part of the film.

The carbon footprint for this film must have been pretty high, what with all the flights Gameau took but all carbon emissions from the film have been offset and Gameau and his family have planted a new forest which could sequester up to 90 tonnes of carbon by 2040.

It's an inspiring and thought provoking film. You can find out more about it and add in your thoughts about what you want the world to be like in 2040 on the website What's Your 2040?

2040 is nominated for the 2019 Award for Best Documentary Feature Film.

2040 is screening as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival at: 1820, Thursday 20 June and 11.10 Sunday 23 June, both at Odeon, Lothian Road. You can book tickets here.

**

You can see my other reviews from Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019 by following the links below

Boyz in the Wood.

Disclaimer: I have a press pass for the film festival and attended a free press screening of these films.

Boyz in the Wood - Opening Gala of Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019

Three teenagers - Dean (Rian Gordon), Duncan (Lewis Gribben) and DJ Beatroot (Viraj Juneja) are being forced to do their Duke of Edinburgh Awards as punishment for blowing up a toilet block. They're joined by homeschooled Ian (Samuel Bottomley) who is desperately keen to do his Duke of Edinburgh Award but has no friends to do it with.Their teacher takes them into the Scottish Hilghlands in a minibus and then tells them to make their own way through the mountains to the campsite where he will meet them. He then promptly drives off leaving the inept boys to their own devices. Which of course leads to misadventure and disagreements.


The group soon find themselves the target of a trigger happy member of the landed gentry (Eddie Izzard) who they assume is the Duke of Edinburgh. Whoever he actually is, he wants to rid the countryside of what he sees as youthful scum and goes after the boys.

Meanwhile the local constabulary are distracted from their search for the Highlands bread thief by reports of a large gang marauding the Highlands and start trailing the boys across the mountains.

The film is visually inventive, including weird visual effects mirroring the experience of the characters getting high on the best kept secret in the Highlands (hallucinogenic rabbit droppings) and the sountrack reverberates with hip hop music provided by DJ Beatroot.

Behind all the fun there are serious points being made about the rural urban divide, class and intergenerational conflict and the alienation of young people from nature. But apart from one scene, the film carries it's core messages lightly.

This is a hilarious, action packed adventure and a brilliantly entertaining opening to this year's film festival, though I suspect Visit Scotland might not entirely approve at yet another film showing the dark side of the Scottish Highlands.

Boys in the Wood screens as the Opening Gala of the Edinburgh International Film Festival at 2045, Wednesday 19 June at the Festival Theatre. There seem to still be some tickets available and you can book yours here.

**
Boyz in the Wood would make a great double bill with Hunt for the Wilderpeople, one of my favourite ever films that has screened at Edinburgh International Film Festival and which is co-incidentally screening (one screening only) tonight at the Cameo in Edinburgh. You can read my review of Hunt for the Wilderpeople here.

 Disclaimer: I have a press pass for the film festival and attended a free press screening of this film.

Has Scottish Natural Heritage Lost it's Way?

Recently, Francesca Osowska the Chief Executive of Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) has been hailed as a great environmental leader for a speech she gave on climate change. However there is more to being a great leader of an environmental organisation than the ability to stand in front of an audience and read a speech written for you by a team of communications professionals.

More and more people, including staff members and people who work for environmental organisations such as the RSPB, have recently become concerned about the direction of SNH.

Here are just a few of my concerns:

The SNH five year plan (you can see it on their website here) mentions things such as economic development and sustainable enconomy far more frequently than it mentions nature reserves, protected areas or protected species. Which is strange seeing as SNH is supposed to be the government organisation charged with looking after protected areas and protected species in Scotland.

SNH now seems to focus much more on urban wildlife than rural wildlife. Their argument is that more people are in urban areas and that we need to connect with nature in the places we live. This is of course entirely true, however, this doesn't mean that urban nature is of itself more important than rural nature. Nature has its own value, independent of whether people are connecting to it and if nature isn't being protected then there's nothing there for people to connect to.

SNH has recently licensed controversial culls of wildlife (including goosanders and other birds that eat fish). Now in some cases culls may be the only way to deal with a problematic species (particularly an invasive species that is damaging the local ecology). However such culls should only go ahead after rigorous scientific research into alternatives. No such research was done by SNH before licensing these culls.

SNH seems nowadays to put most of its money into communications. A series of animations have been produced in conjunction with Young Scot to encourage young people to get outdoors. In an age of severely contrstrained budgets for public bodies then hard decisions need to be made and surely there is no justification for the body that is charged with protecting our landscapes and wildlife to take money from the budget to do exactly that and instead to fund pretty little animations that encourage people to go for a walk in their local park?

With most of its money going into communications, vital services such as monitoring the state of nature reserves and other protected areas in Scotland are becoming devalued and underfunded. If SNH (remember this is the statutory agency charged with looking after our protected areas and species) aren't going to monitor the state of the areas they are supposed to protect then who is? And if we don't know the state of our protected areas how do we know whether our landscapes and wildlife are being properly protected?

And if SNH is serious about the ecological emergency, that Francesca apparently spoke so eloquently about in her recent speech then they really need to be making sure that our wild lands, nature reserves protected areas and species are thoroughly protected to ensure that we have the best possible future for our environment.

If you live or work in Scotland and are concerned about how SNH may be failing in its duties to protect our wildlife and wild lands, please consider contacting your MSP or contact Francesca Osowska directly (her email is ceoATnatureDOTscot relacing AT with @ and DOT with .).

From Holey Socks to Fingerless Gloves

It's June but we've been having some unseasonably cold and wet weather, so I was looking for my fingerless gloves the other day but realised that I'd probably left them somewhere. So I thought I'd make another pair. I picked up one of the pairs of holey socks sitting in a pile waiting to be mended or repurposed.

I cut off the foot part and then cut out holes for the thumbs. I then sewed round the thumb holes and the top of the gloves with a nice bright embroidery thread and there's a nice pair of fingerless gloves. They're not quite identical but that's fine.

Ironically today looks as though it's going to be warm and sunny so I won't be wearing these gloves today! I'm sure I'll find plenty of opportunity to do so though!