Of Birth & Brittle Teeth

Marinah Janello

Director(s): Marinah Janello

"Of Birth and Brittle Teeth" chronicles the lives of a group of subsistence farmers located in central Spain, dedicated to living off the land that they tend. With the use of spoken poetry and documentations of their daily lives, the film encourages the viewer to see the agronomist and their harvest as one. Finding myself as a foreign entity among this tight-knit community, the film became an experiment in lucid dreaming. Everywhere I looked I saw continuous life cycles wherein both the crops and livestock had become intertwined with their keepers. The film opens with the retrieval of honey, and inevitably, the release of honey bees on a pleasant mid summer day. Later, fresh meat is being butchered and at this very moment the nutrients that lend life to the farmers are that which are the remains of the once living livestock. Once the nutrients have been passed from the livestock to the farmers, the nutrients travel through the roots of the plants allowing them to flourish and prosper. The roles are then reversed as my fantasy comes to life, and the plants end up tending to the humans, who are growing in the dirt and on the trees. In the end, the harvest and the farmers are inseparable when the berries end up tasting like meat as they are consumed by a young child. As for the writing, I let myself remain in a day dream a moment too long until the sky was not sky anymore and the land no longer land. Natural elements that made up the landscape became representations of the human body, similar to the the anthropomorphized surroundings in Paris that Robert Desnos’ “Sleep Spaces” describes.