By Adam Rabiner
The Linewaiters’ Gazette ran an earlier version of this review on May 20, 2010 for a screening of Juliette of the Herbs on June 8, 2010. Since its inception in the fall of 2009 the Plow to Plate film series has presented over 70 films and this is one of our favorites, hence the reason we are bringing it back for a second screening. This is not a film you can see on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
I rarely attend official screenings at the coop since I watch the films at home in order to review them before they are shown to the public. In this case I may very well make an exception and take my gardening and herb loving children along with me. It’s truly a film worth catching.
It is 1998 and an elderly English lady, in her mid-80s, lives alone on Kythira, a Greek island, without running water or electricity, lovingly tending her olive tree and reminiscing on her remarkable life. She is Juliette de Bairacli Levy, a pioneer of holistic veterinary medicine; whose book The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable and other texts have had considerable impact on animal husbandry, farm management practices and the herbal renaissance movement. While today her ideas are widely accepted and hardly radical, when Juliette first began to express her beliefs, she was a lone crusader for herbal medicine. Juliette of the Herbs follows Juliette and her Afghan hound for seven years, from 1991 to 1998, as she restlessly wanders the globe. The documentary is filmed in Greece, Spain, France, Portugal, Switzerland, England and America. To the end Juliette was an intrepid nomad and explorer. After the cameras stopped rolling, she would live another 11 years, dying in 2009 at the ripe old age of 96.
Born in 1912 to a Turkish father and an Egyptian mother, Juliette is best known for her groundbreaking books on herbs, but she also had a veterinary practice, raised and sold Afghan dogs, and wrote novels and poems (some of which are read in the film).
By far though, her greatest accomplishment is her free spirited life; it is the way she chose to live that makes this story worth telling. After suffering the devastating loss of a puppy as a child, Juliette was determined she would grow up to become an animal healer. Many years later, after studying veterinary medicine at the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool in her youth, she embarked in the 1930s on a wondrous 60-year journey living among and adopting the simple nomadic lifestyles of European gypsies, North African Berbers in Morocco and Tunisia, Mexican peasants, Afghan tribesmen, and Israeli Bedouins, with a stint in the 1940s in California.
From their oral traditions, and her own observations of nature, she learned how herbs, plants, and flowers keep animals and people healthy and also have the power to heal. She became adept at making medicines out of leaves, roots, barks, and other things found in nature like spider webs. Modestly, Juliette refuses to take credit for recording the oral traditions of her adopted cultures and documenting the lessons she learned from the natural world. She says she is just a messenger; a scholar-gypsy. The true teachers, she says, are the animals and the plants.
Juliette likes to tell incredible stories where nature plays the starring role: a salve of rosemary that cured the gangrenous leg of a patient; a syrup made from poppies that saved her dying newborn daughter from typhus and almost certain death; an incident in which her faithful Afghan hound and traveling companion saved her life by bolting suddenly from under a fig tree where they had been sleeping moments before it collapsed.
Over the course of the film you grow fond of Juliette who is gentle and kind. Collecting herbs, Juliette plucks only a handful of leaves, taking pains to thank the bush for its bounty and generosity, a custom she learned from the gypsies. Juliette calls her garden her teacher and her friend. Her love for animals, plants and people is strong and her excitement and passion for life runs deep. You could do worse than spend 75 minutes in the company of this exceptional human being who personified the belief that the world itself is the ultimate classroom.
The Linewaiters’ Gazette ran an earlier version of this review on May 20, 2010 for a screening of Juliette of the Herbs on June 8, 2010. Since its inception in the fall of 2009 the Plow to Plate film series has presented over 70 films and this is one of our favorites, hence the reason we are bringing it back for a second screening. This is not a film you can see on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
I rarely attend official screenings at the coop since I watch the films at home in order to review them before they are shown to the public. In this case I may very well make an exception and take my gardening and herb loving children along with me. It’s truly a film worth catching.
It is 1998 and an elderly English lady, in her mid-80s, lives alone on Kythira, a Greek island, without running water or electricity, lovingly tending her olive tree and reminiscing on her remarkable life. She is Juliette de Bairacli Levy, a pioneer of holistic veterinary medicine; whose book The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable and other texts have had considerable impact on animal husbandry, farm management practices and the herbal renaissance movement. While today her ideas are widely accepted and hardly radical, when Juliette first began to express her beliefs, she was a lone crusader for herbal medicine. Juliette of the Herbs follows Juliette and her Afghan hound for seven years, from 1991 to 1998, as she restlessly wanders the globe. The documentary is filmed in Greece, Spain, France, Portugal, Switzerland, England and America. To the end Juliette was an intrepid nomad and explorer. After the cameras stopped rolling, she would live another 11 years, dying in 2009 at the ripe old age of 96.
Born in 1912 to a Turkish father and an Egyptian mother, Juliette is best known for her groundbreaking books on herbs, but she also had a veterinary practice, raised and sold Afghan dogs, and wrote novels and poems (some of which are read in the film).
By far though, her greatest accomplishment is her free spirited life; it is the way she chose to live that makes this story worth telling. After suffering the devastating loss of a puppy as a child, Juliette was determined she would grow up to become an animal healer. Many years later, after studying veterinary medicine at the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool in her youth, she embarked in the 1930s on a wondrous 60-year journey living among and adopting the simple nomadic lifestyles of European gypsies, North African Berbers in Morocco and Tunisia, Mexican peasants, Afghan tribesmen, and Israeli Bedouins, with a stint in the 1940s in California.
From their oral traditions, and her own observations of nature, she learned how herbs, plants, and flowers keep animals and people healthy and also have the power to heal. She became adept at making medicines out of leaves, roots, barks, and other things found in nature like spider webs. Modestly, Juliette refuses to take credit for recording the oral traditions of her adopted cultures and documenting the lessons she learned from the natural world. She says she is just a messenger; a scholar-gypsy. The true teachers, she says, are the animals and the plants.
Juliette likes to tell incredible stories where nature plays the starring role: a salve of rosemary that cured the gangrenous leg of a patient; a syrup made from poppies that saved her dying newborn daughter from typhus and almost certain death; an incident in which her faithful Afghan hound and traveling companion saved her life by bolting suddenly from under a fig tree where they had been sleeping moments before it collapsed.
Over the course of the film you grow fond of Juliette who is gentle and kind. Collecting herbs, Juliette plucks only a handful of leaves, taking pains to thank the bush for its bounty and generosity, a custom she learned from the gypsies. Juliette calls her garden her teacher and her friend. Her love for animals, plants and people is strong and her excitement and passion for life runs deep. You could do worse than spend 75 minutes in the company of this exceptional human being who personified the belief that the world itself is the ultimate classroom.