Synopsis

An urban wasteland in a poor, outlying district of Berlin becomes the site of a young woman’s (Marina) unconventional quest. Neglected for years due to the exorbitant price demanded by its owner, the land comes back to life when the woman plants potatoes and beans, and street children join her in helping to transform the place. As she connects with the land, she embarks on a poetic and documentary investigation of its value.

Project

The film takes as its subject a wasteland in the city of Berlin, and questions the value that can be attributed to this kind of place, as well as notions of ownership and use. It lies at the crossroads of two artistic approaches: the work of Vincent Jondeau, who in his filmic and photographic work attempts to develop ecological forms of narration by decentering the human gaze and including the perspective and memory of non-human beings; and the work of Marina Resende Santos, who questions the capacity for action, technology and ecology in urban space through public interventions and research-based projects. The challenge of the visual and documentary research they have undertaken together is to highlight the richness and potential of counter-spaces known as « terrain vague » or « urban wasteland », threatened by the processes of metropolization.

Description

An urban wasteland in a poor, outlying district of Berlin becomes the site of a young woman’s (Marina) unconventional quest. Neglected for years due to the exorbitant price demanded by its owner, the land comes back to life when the woman plants potatoes and beans, and street children join her in helping to transform the place. As she connects with the land, she embarks on a poetic and documentary investigation of its value. 

Through the eyes of this woman, the film discovers the plants and animals that thrived while the land was unoccupied. For there is no such thing as empty land. Each « third landscape » (Gilles Clément) is a place of ecological life and a place full of untold stories. Over the course of a summer, the film also captures the immediacy of the children’s relationship to their world, their nascent bond with the land through the observation of their gestures, words and glances. By delving into the history of the land, through neighbors’ stories, memories of the place, city maps and satellite images, the film also reveals certain ghostly aspects of the place: a garden, a house demolished seven years ago, a man named Vassily living in a makeshift shack out of sight and evicted two years ago.

In her quest to find out the value of the land, the young woman meets real estate agents with a more abstract vision of space, revealing the value of this urban wasteland according to market considerations. The film’s title refers to this value. To raise the funds needed to buy the land, a farmer would have to grow potatoes all over it for 628 years. The value created by Marina and the children, on the other hand, lies in the most ephemeral of times, that of a sunny summer. The collective harvest that punctuates the project brings together an ephemeral community made up of the wife and her friends, the children and their big brothers. Together, they dig up the potatoes they’ve grown and turn them into delicious French fries, which they distribute to themselves and the locals from their own improvised stand. By cooking together, children and adults share their cultures and their links with other living beings. The value of life-giving land, nutrition and community is materialized against the abstractions of ownership and price.

Part documentary, part film-essay, « 628 Years of Potatoes » is an ode to the life of the third landscape and the ephemeral reclamation of the value of soil: food, community, play and transformation.