The Fruit Hunters

You can find them deep in the jungles of Borneo; in the canyons of the Hollywood Hills; in market stalls in Bali; and even in your own backyard. They’re the Fruit Hunters, the subjects of the new film from acclaimed director Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze, China Heavyweight). Driven by an unquenchable passion to taste the wondrous, weird and unique, they’ve dedicated their lives to creating a Garden of Eden in a world increasingly dominated by industrialized monoculture.

The Fruit Hunters is a dizzying ride through human history and culture, a colourful kaleidoscope of a film that shows us just how intertwined we are with the fruits we eat, told through the stories of devoted, lifelong fruit fanatics.

There’s Bill Pullman, the movie star (Independence Day, Lost Highway) whose passion for fruit leads him on a crusade to save one of the last untouched patches of land in Hollywood, a peak just below the iconic sign, and turn it into a community orchard. In Bali and Borneo, Noris Ledesma and Richard Campbell, the “Indiana Joneses” of fruit, seek to find and preserve rare varieties of mangos and durians before they’re steamrolled by industrialization. In the jungles of Honduras scientist Juan Aguilar races against time to breed a banana resistant to Tropical Race Four, a devastating fungus that wiped out the world’s banana crop once before and threatens to again. And in the hills of Umbria, Italy, fruit detective Isabella Dalla Ragione investigates Renaissance-era paintings for lost fruits and hunts down the last remaining examples of those ancient cultivars.

The Fruit Hunters interweaves the stories of these modern-day obsessives with gorgeous glimpses of humanity’s long love affair with fruit: from our prehistoric beginnings as hunter-gatherers whose lives literally depended on it, to Victorian-era adventurers who set out to parts unknown to bring home the rare gems now commonplace in
supermarkets.

And, just as important And, just as important as the human characters in the film are the fruits themselves, presented in their mouthwatering glory: brilliantly colourful mangos, silky ice cream beans, creamy cherimoyas and sense-altering miracle fruit. With its luscious visuals and stunning soundtrack by Montreal composer Olivier Alary, The Fruit Hunters is truly a feast for the senses.

A thrilling journey through nature, commerce and adventure, The Fruit Hunters is a cinematic odyssey that takes viewers from the dawn of humanity to the cutting of edge of modern agriculture—a film that will change not just the way we look at we eat, but what it means to be human.