Another World is plantable! Part 5
Urban Community Gardens in Germany, 2016
DVD, 55 minutes
Ella von der Haide
Produced by anstiftung GmbH / Eine andere Welt ist pflanzbar!
Over 500 community gardens have been created in Germany in recent years, and the trend is rising. The individual garden projects are as different as their gardeners and the cities in which they are located. Urban gardens are far more than a phenomenon in hip metropolitan centers, as all the gardens in small towns and suburbs prove.
Map of the Gardens
The new film by Ella von der Haide is a journey to seven community gardens in Germany:
Gemeinschaftsgarten Annalinde Leipzig, Keimzelle und Hof vorm Deich Hamburg, Interkultureller Frauengarten Oberhausen, Experimentier- und Wabengarten des Ökologischen Bildungszentrums München, Interkultureller Garten Aalen.
We get to know the projects in their urban environment and accompany them over a year through the four seasons: from sowing to harvesting to winter work. The largest community garden covers two hectares and the smallest just 150 square meters.
In the gardens, people from different generations and from the most diverse social milieus meet – from kindergarten children to pensioners, people with and without a migration background. They garden as a hobby to support themselves or to pass on knowledge. For some it’s a form of political protest or urban design, for others it’s the therapy that keeps them alive, still others make a living here.
Refugees report themselves why intercultural gardens are important places for them to arrive in their new lives in so many different ways.
Many topics are implemented in concrete terms in the community gardens: the preservation of traditional crops and the passing on of old craft techniques, food sovereignty, participatory urban design, therapeutic healing through gardening, design of commons, inclusion of migrants, support for refugees, testing of new alternative and collective economies and much more.
The community gardens are places of social transformation and visions in which a socially just, grassroots democratic, inclusive and ecological society is experimentally tested.
This film inspires like the gardens themselves!
Directed by Ella von der Haide
Camera: Sanne Kurz
Production: anstiftung gGmbh and Eine andere Welt ist pflanzbar!
The individual excerpts are also available on Youtube:
Frühling: Gemeinschaftsgarten Annalinde, Leipzig
Sommer: Keimzelle und Hof vorm Deich, Hamburg
Interkultureller Frauengarten Oberhausen
Herbst: Experimentier- und Wabengarten des Ökologischen Bildungszentrums, München
Winter: Interkultureller Garten Aalen
This film is available on DVD.
Screening rights are free for charitable projects.
Stream free on Vimeo
(only for private purposes)