Our projects

Consider a tomato

A film by Marina Sulima
Production: near/by film


Consider cutting a tomato open, consider the worlds contained within. Consider a recipe for pickled tomatoes in a world full of LED-light grown, rock-wool sown tomatoes. Consider following tomatoes from closed-off Dutch greenhouses to Moldova, home to the filmmaker and many greenhouse workers, who leave their own tomato patches to work behind glass walls. Consider your guide to be a manuscript full of family recipes and countless ways of fermenting tomatoes.


Director's statement

 

"It all started with the anger of being told that LED-light-grown tomatoes can feed the world. That high-tech agriculture has overcome its dependency on land. By following a simple tomato, I wanted to poke at this myth and show its global tentacles. I did not want to travel the world to make this film. I did not want to make a personal film either. But when I started browsing through a family recipe manuscript, I saw history unfolding in and through my mother’s recipes. I browsed through it, scouring for clues. Clues or answers to questions that food makes you think of: where does food come from, how it’s made, what kinds of lives are linked to different ways of growing food. What way of life follows if farming becomes a monster with a spraying tractor for its head and all the world’s resources – copper, aluminium, lithium and arsenic – to stuff its belly with. This essay-film is my offer on the altar of a dissappearing form of life. To preserve it, but not just for looking at. A film like a pickle that we may open up when the LED-lights go out. A recognition that the changes in the life of a Moldovan villager are linked to the lives of tomatoes. And that their stories are worthy of film."

 

Consider a tomato is Marina's first long film following het graduation short Parcelpaedia, which won her a Wildcard from Netherlands Film Fund.

Website Marina Sulima
Creative documentary, 73 min

Realized
Expected release: 2025
Supported by Netherlands Film Fund - Wildcard

Crew

Written and directed by: Marina Sulima
Producer: Manon Bovenkerk
Editor: Albert Elings
Composer: Sanam Tahmasebi
Sound design: Fokke van Saane
Text editor: Jesse Havinga
Camera: Andrei Moraru, Thomas Grootoonk, Marina Sulima
Additional camera: Lucian Spătaru, Olivia D’Cruz
Animation support: Olivia D’Cruz
Sound recording: Constantin Coadă, Alexandros Papamarkou
Additional sound: Viorel Gasnas, Albert Elings
Musicians: Sanam Tahmasebi, Radik Faydek
Final mix: Alex Booy