Hope in Grain (Buğday): The Collapse of Food Sovereignty, the Dystopian Narrative, and Bloch’s Philosophy of Hunger and Hope

Abstract

This article examines Semih Kaplanoğlu’s 2017 film Grain (Turkish title Buğday) through the lens of the literature on food sovereignty, the dystopian narrative theory, and Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hunger and hope. Depicting a near future in which natural seeds have been declared illegal and the land has come under the ownership of a biotechnological monopoly, the film frames the disappearance of seeds as both an ecological and existential crisis. Building on Bloch’s (1954) treatment of physical hunger as the starting point in his Principle of Hope, the article directly links his philosophy of hope to the literature on food sovereignty. The academic literature has previously not established this connection, which constitutes the article’s original contribution. Furthermore, the structural similarity between Bloch’s concept of Noch-Nicht [the not-yet] and the concept of hasret [longing] in the sufi tradition lays the groundwork for interpreting the film at the interface of both a materialist and spiritual theory of hope. Consequently, this study argues the film Grain to be a critical work that keeps the utopian potential alive even within the darkest layers of dystopia.