This film narrates stories of deeply embedded entanglements of communities with their native seeds, local food diversity, land, and rivers through ceremonies, songs and festivals.

Narrated through: The voices of women of Odisha in the Bay of Bengal, songs sung by elders of the High Northern Himalayas, and through timeless customs of the Adivasi Community in Chattisgarh. Annapurna, the Goddess of food and abundance is invoked in these stories, bringing to life the sacred in the interconnectedness between seed, food, community and the Earth.

These farming communities of India mitigate climate change, and reclaim their seed and food sovereignty by keeping these ceremonies alive.

This 35 minute short film is a snippet of the grassroots work, the Navdanya farmers’ movement founded by Dr.Vandana Shiva has been doing for over forty years. Join us in celebrating these communities that have relentlessly fought against structures of colonization and capitalism to keep their way of knowing, living and being alive.

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SYNOPSIS

Annapurna is a lyrical documentary about rice as more than a crop: it is food, faith, memory and resistance. Moving across Odisha, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh, the film enters the everyday worlds of rice-growing communities where agricultural labour is inseparable from ritual and celebration. From Lakshmi Puja in Odisha, where women welcome the goddess of food with drawings made of rice paste, to communal sowing festivals in the hills and tribal regions, ritual becomes a way of honouring the earth, sharing labour and safeguarding sustenance. These practices bind communities together and affirm rice as the moral and nutritional centre of life.

At the heart of the film are women farmers, custodians of seed, food and health, whose work stretches from the field to the kitchen. Their commitment to indigenous, organic rice is shown not as nostalgia but as practical wisdom in precarious agrarian economies, where saving grain can mean survival through droughts, floods or lockdowns. Seed saving emerges as an ethical act: grain is held in commons, exchanged through festivals, and preserved even at the cost of hunger, ensuring food security for future seasons.

The film also traces the legacy of Dr Radheylal Ricchharia, a pioneering scientist who learned from tribal farmers and became a fierce defender of India’s indigenous rice diversity. His resistance to the takeover of local seeds by international institutions and corporations helped inspire movements to protect seed sovereignty. Through stories of lost and revived varieties-aromatic, medicinal, flood- and drought-tolerant-Annapurna reveals rice as a living archive of ecological knowledge.

Ultimately, the film argues that rice cultures are cultures of dignity and equality. In honouring Annapurna, the goddess of food, these communities affirm a vision of nourishment rooted in care, commons and continuity.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Neel Chaudhuri is a playwright, theatre director and filmmaker based in New Delhi, India. He has worked on several short documentaries that focus on climate change, ecology and sustainable agriculture, working in collaboration with Navdanya and their grassroots organic farming movements. His previous films include The Third Pole (2009) – about farming communities in Ladakh tackling drought and floods, Yield (2013) – about the effects of BT Cotton in Vidarbha, Maharashtra, and Shakti (2022) about women farmers collectives across India.