The Miracle of Almería (Het Mirakel Van Almeria)
Qumra Projects
/ Feature Documentary / Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Qatar / 2022
In Arabic, Bambara, Spanish
Rated: This film has not been rated.
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Synopsis
At the far end of Europe, on the southern border of Spain, lies Almería. It is a huge province completely covered with white plastic, harbouring Europe’s largest vegetable garden. It is the place where our tomatoes come from, even in winter. But under all the plastic, strange things happen. Today, Almeria’s freshwater resources are nearly exhausted, pesticides and large quantities of plastic have irreversibly contaminated the soil. Supermarkets yearly decrease the price they are willing to pay for their tomatoes. Vegetable cultivation moves inevitably to Poland and Africa. Spanish farmers dive well under their prices to keep in the race. 120,000 migrants work in slave-like conditions on the plantations. In this film the inhabitants of Almeria work together to reveal how Almerìa grew from an empty desert in the 1950s, into a white, plastic kingdom in the 1980s—and finally into an exhausted wasteland today. With the use of their imagination, we try to find out the blind spots of our capitalist system.