BUT WHY ARE THE BANANAS CROOKED?

A bananaplant and a botanist meet in a glasshouse somewhere in Brussels. A pretty normal situation, if the banana plant didn't start talking. What follows is a strange encounter. A modern tale with deep roots in our history.

MIRNA EVERHARD

A film director and producer Born in Amsterdam and based in Brussels. She has a background in branding and sociology and has an ongoing curiosity to visually explore the seemingly unknown. In 2020 she graduated Cum Laude as MA of Arts in Documentary Directing from the international DocNomads Joint Degree Program based in Lisbon, Budapest and Brussels. Her first short documentaries Bruno Jumps (2018) and Bird/Man (2019) were selected at numerous festivals worldwide. In her filmic work Mirna explores the world of ostensibly peculiar people or activities. With precision and minimal tools, she searches for a shared human element. Her visual style has the aim to get close and look behind the obvious in order to relate.

An impressive banana plant waved her leaves towards me, during a gray and rainy day in Jardin Botanique. ’How the hell is this tropical plant surviving in this crappy weather?’ was my initial thought. Soon it seemed however more relevant to question how she actually ended up in the heart of bussy Brussels, Belgium. My search for this answer made me realize that this particular banana plant was my key to have a dialogue with the colonial past of Europe. But why are the bananas crooked? is a seemingly innocent antropomorf tale, avoiding the classical historical documentary approach. By humanizing a banana plant, the film tries to address the dehumanization in a more latent way. By shifting seemingly evident roles of human and plant, I tried to challenge seemingly evident assumptions of hierarchy.

DOKer 2021 — Short Competition

The screening is supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Moscow