Experiencing Interruptions?

Consider a Tomato

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.

  • Marina Sulima
    Director
  • Marina Sulima
    Writer
  • Manon Bovenkerk
    Producer
    In Flow of Words, City of Poets
  • Albert Elings
    Editing
  • Sanam Tahmasebi
    Music
  • Fokke van Saane
    Sound design
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Genres:
    family, migration, labor
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 13 minutes 17 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 31, 2024
  • Country of Origin:
    Netherlands
  • Country of Filming:
    Moldova, Netherlands
  • Language:
    Dutch, English, Romanian
  • Shooting Format:
    digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Marina Sulima

Marina Sulima is an artist born in Moldova, working and living in Groningen.
She has graduated in 2020 from Minerva Academy in Groningen with Parcelpaedia, a short film about Italy Syndrome: a depression specific to Eastern European women who work as caregivers in Italy. The film received a Wildcard from Netherlands Filmfonds, which allowed her to make a long creative documentary: Consider a tomato.

"I work with illustration, animation, sculpture and film to create stories that follow the trajectories of certain objects: a parcel, a shrimp's ear, landfill juice, a mineral ore or a tomato. This allows me to engage with a worn-out and heart-broken world and re-center human stories around the land."

Add Director Biography
Director 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.