A Winter at Heenat Salma

In the first film, children with disabilities make paintings with plants, using what the farm grows as their material. The film follows the making and not the cause: a hand pressing a leaf, a colour appearing on paper, a child deciding something is finished. We stayed at the children’s height, in the farm’s daylight, and let each of them set the pace of a scene.

The second film launches the farm’s nursery, which grows vegetable seedlings, aromatic plants, fruit trees and native trees, all from organic seed. The plants are bred to take Qatar’s heat, and that is the story: how a seedling is raised to survive the summer it will meet. We filmed the nursery up close, with soil, leaf and water in natural light, so the viewer could see why each plant looks as it does.

The farm describes every visit as an invitation to slow down. We adopted the same rule for both films. We used long takes, few cuts, and sound taken from the place itself, the garden, the paper, the voices. A film about growing and making should move at the speed of growing and making.

2 mini documentaries

Painting With Plants

Mashatel Salma, the nursery launch