Arab Film Series: Wild Relatives + talkback

Wild Relatives, which plays this Thursday at the Arab American Museum, is largely a study in counterpoints. Tugging at a fraying, ropelike thread that stretches from Svalbard to Aleppo with some detours into Lebanon, Jumana Manna's documentary explores the collective, cross-cultural efforts to preserve seed varieties grown in Syria amid the threat posed by their civil war — a threat, too, to the already-faint hope for a less-industrialized, more locally adaptable form of agriculture.