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.