Comments on: Grow Your Own http://lancastria.net/blog/grow-your-own.html Neuschwanstein, a castle that belongs in Blackburn Lancashire less the 4000 holes Fri, 18 May 2012 05:09:50 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: Neuschwanstein http://lancastria.net/blog/grow-your-own.html#comment-523 Neuschwanstein Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:27:33 +0000 http://lancastria.net/blog/?p=3829#comment-523 Grow Your Own did not begin - as most of my films have done - with a round of pitches and commissions in film company offices. It grew from a seed that was planted and nurtured in "Art in Action" - a long-established community arts project based in Bootle. Carl Hunter - who helps the project - was approached by Margrit Ruegg and asked to make a short video to promote and help raise funds for an extraordinary enterprise. Margrit is a psychotherapist and the director of the Family Refugee Support Project in Liverpool. The people she works with have had terrible experiences in their home countries, and were trying to cope with the physical and mental aftereffects of those experiences in the sometimes inhospitable atmosphere of their adopted city. Under Margrit's scheme, these people were given - not drugs - but allotments. The theory was simple. Many asylum seekers have difficulty sleeping and are vulnerable to bouts of depression and lethargy. Gardening provides structure, social contact and a drug-free path to total exhaustion. Many refugees had been very productive in their home countries (we met headteachers, engineers, even a leading clothes designer on the scheme), so they found the enforced idleness of asylum seeking (applicants are not allowed to do paid work) hard to take. Producing fruit and veg for the family table helped with that. Margrit had £2,000 with which she hoped Carl could make a 10-minute video presentation to help her raise funding. From the moment I heard about it, I could barely contain myself. An inspiring story, epic in scope, was unfolding under our own noses. Carl wanted to make a feature documentary - something in the tradition of Etre et Avoir. He planned to visit the allotments every week for a year, charting their transformation from virtual rubbish heap into productive plots. The audience would also see the participants' self-confidence blossom and their spoken English change. It would be a ready-made fable. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2007/may/10/cultivatinggrowyourown Grow Your Own did not begin – as most of my films have done – with a round of pitches and commissions in film company offices. It grew from a seed that was planted and nurtured in “Art in Action” – a long-established community arts project based in Bootle.

Carl Hunter – who helps the project – was approached by Margrit Ruegg and asked to make a short video to promote and help raise funds for an extraordinary enterprise. Margrit is a psychotherapist and the director of the Family Refugee Support Project in Liverpool. The people she works with have had terrible experiences in their home countries, and were trying to cope with the physical and mental aftereffects of those experiences in the sometimes inhospitable atmosphere of their adopted city. Under Margrit’s scheme, these people were given – not drugs – but allotments.

The theory was simple. Many asylum seekers have difficulty sleeping and are vulnerable to bouts of depression and lethargy. Gardening provides structure, social contact and a drug-free path to total exhaustion. Many refugees had been very productive in their home countries (we met headteachers, engineers, even a leading clothes designer on the scheme), so they found the enforced idleness of asylum seeking (applicants are not allowed to do paid work) hard to take. Producing fruit and veg for the family table helped with that. Margrit had £2,000 with which she hoped Carl could make a 10-minute video presentation to help her raise funding. From the moment I heard about it, I could barely contain myself.

An inspiring story, epic in scope, was unfolding under our own noses. Carl wanted to make a feature documentary – something in the tradition of Etre et Avoir. He planned to visit the allotments every week for a year, charting their transformation from virtual rubbish heap into productive plots. The audience would also see the participants’ self-confidence blossom and their spoken English change. It would be a ready-made fable.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2007/may/10/cultivatinggrowyourown

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