Introducing The Hands Who Feed Us

Dear Fouràco friends, family, and followers,

Caroline here! I am writing you all one big open letter, on behalf of a collective you possibly do not know — nor are able to — pronounce … from Marseille, where I’ve been for the last four months, researching the upcoming project of our film collective. Prior to getting into the nit and grit… a semi-concise introduction might do us some good!

For starters:

• Fouràco (foo-rah-koe) = the film collective of the  four artists behind Tomato Skin.

• Tomato Skin = a four-act, food & agriculture-focused documentary which premiered in January 2026 at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater.

• The team members: Caroline Levin (writer & director), Malik (cinematographer & sound engineer), Dalton Mumphry (music composer), Ansley Nguyen Stotelmyre (visual / animation artist). Artists in our respective fields, we meet at two common crossroads: a) each of us practices a medium on which moving image depends on, and b) we’ve all spent our dream-big post-college years as food system workers. Who knew restaurants became the new art schools :D!

Once in restaurant-art school, naturally, your choice of subject matter is limited (dare some call it specialized).

One angle of required knowledge is the source of each ingredient. Given how seriously Lulu’s former chef Luis Sierra took lineup interrogation, we were (part intimidated but mostly) inspired to take an interest in the names of those growing each ingredient: those physically touching the soil and seed that give farm-to-table its marketable clout.

Chef Luis’s attention to food prompted us to think a little deeper about our own relationship toward the network of people that keep our given food system afloat.

Another inspiration for the questions/ thought experiment behind Tomato Skin was Hanoi-based artist Kieu Anh Nguyen and her installation entitled Somewhere between drained and dried. Kieu Anh spoke to me of her work back in the spring of 2023, in my studio in the neighborhood of Truc Bach (~sheltering from Hanoi’s infamous “moldy march”, chatting over lotus tea and guava with salt~).

Displayed at the Vietnamese Women’s Museum, Kieu Anh’s work consisted of a ginger-scented wax mold of her grandmother’s hands melting over the course of a week.

In her descriptive blurb, she writes: “This work is my question to the system: who is taking care of the hands of the caretakers?”

We give full credit to Kieu Anh for planting the seeds of our own system questioning. Tomato Skin comes, in part,  in ode to her:  “Who is taking care of the hands who  feed us?”

The Hands Who Feed Us

The Hands Who Feed Us is a documentary series that explores cities and regions from the ground up, following food back to its roots — to the soil, landscapes, and people who grow what eventually ends up on our plates. Think Anthony Bourdain meets Agnès Varda!

In Fouràco fashion, we present to you why this series matters to us, as it should to you, today more than ever:

1. Despite being a sector that directly implicates each and every one of us in our day-to-day lives — and despite the urban-rural divide being one of the biggest talking points in elections gone awry — agriculture seldom gets a spotlight outside of niche election-oriented journalism.

2. The food system sits at the crossroads of migration, labor, land, class, ecology, family, tradition and economics — a niche lens that opens onto a vast diversity of folks (and food:). Many-a storytelling seeds!

3. The need to contemplate care is urgent now more than ever. What do I mean by this? For starters, it can be in contemplating what you actually give a damn about (rather than just being informed on as an absent-minded civic checklist). Beyond the passive introspection, this also means to proactively bear witness to the act of care itself. Perhaps this can be in locating certain gestures — such as hands touching soil. There is something quietly radical in meditating on this, on an interaction most of us in urban bubbles rarely take the time to pay attention to, let alone practice.

4. Russian doll effect: when you locate human gestures, you encounter human stories (most often, ones you weren’t even looking for!).

Episode 1: Marseille

I will make the confident assumption that most of what you and I know or hear about Marseille never come from Marseillais(e) themselves. A brilliant illustration of this discursive gap is in Bruno Le Dantec’s La Ville-sans-nom : Marseille dans la bouche de ceux qui l’assassinent, where the French writer catalogues commentary on the city from the mouths of French politicians and journalists. With over seventy pages of clichéd characterizations of Marseille and its inhabitants, an evident narrative comes to the surface: from gang violence, to drug trafficking, to staggering levels of poverty, to talk of government funds being flushed down the drain, to two cents such as that of former French PM Manuel Valls — “we must take [the city] back to square zero, we have to raze it all down” — etc. In short: there has long been little wiggle room in the media’s imaginary of Marseille for anything beyond urban decay, danger and delinquency.

As Malik and I bonded over films such as La Haine and The Battle of Algiers, we knew from the get-go that we shared a common impulse to listen for — and now locate — counter-narratives. Marseille is a city known for always having operated against the grain, for marching to the beat of its own drum. This is one characteristic, among others, that we found had an immediate parallel with Los Angeles (hot take!).

2) Both are exceptionally migrant cities, something reflected in their cultural wealth as much as their dependency on migrant labor (the latter being the backbone of each respective country but hyper-visible in Marseille and LA alike). Remove that labor and cultural contribution, and what remains of either city?

3) Both cities sit within agricultural regions that are inseparable from their urban lives. They share a Mediterranean climate: lush growth and an extraordinary abundance of produce alongside frequent droughts and increasingly urgent struggles over water. Both are also surrounded by diverse rural regions whose electoral demographics can look strikingly different from those of the cities themselves.

4) Both are cities of the people. Community activism has long defined the political life of these coastal capitals, with people actively filling in the gaps of infrastructural neglect through mutual aid initiatives, neighborhood organizing, and forms of collective life that exist whether or not the state has managed to provide for them.

These parallels are part of why Marseille became the obvious place to begin The Hands Who Feed Us. Not because it is interchangeable with Los Angeles (quite the opposite!) but because it offers another place through which to ask a question we had already begun asking there: what do you see when you stop listening to the soundbites about a place, and, rather, begin to pay attention to the people who sustain it?

Faces, Places… Hands & Soil!

To anyone who has yet to see Varda and French photographer JR’s Faces, Places (Visages, Villages): Firstly, it bewilders me to think of an existence without this film in one’s reservoir of instant dopamine doses.

Secondly, I’ll contextualize. Throughout the film, Varda and JR travel to small French towns in JR’s massive van / giant-camera-transformer-type hybrid. At each stop, they encounter inhabitants of France’s diagonale du vide (“diagonal of emptiness”), take their portraits, print them out in massive scale and plaster them onto houses, barns, storefronts — any building that can serve as a canvas. Everyday “anonymous” persons become framed as larger than life — quite literally— and inaugurated into the narrative of their own communities. Alongside Varda’s own lapsing memory, the film becomes the baseline documentary exercise of making people visible. They give a platform to stories of the French working-class and rural lives that might otherwise go untold.

With no delusional inclination of replicating JR and Varda, Malik and I wish to work solely in homage to their heart-warming masterpiece: to forage stories amidst Marseille’s surrounding agricultural landscape.

Who’s feeding Marseille? And… where?

Up until 1950, Marseille operated as a self-sufficient food system — who would’ve thought! This fact is often eclipsed by the massive industrialization wave that transformed the city’s economic core and urban landscape. Despite the historical amnesia, the agricultural heritage of the city makes the attempt to locate those presently feeding the city all the more compelling.

PACA’s ecosystem of small farmers

This starts with the small farmers of the greater Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur (PACA) region.

Given the density of agriculture across PACA, there is an immense associative ecosystem attempting to highlight farmers and facilitate their existence in the face of growing dominance of big agriculture.

However, the agricultural/rural world is not one particularly popular for storytelling outside of niche elections-oriented journalism.

Funny enough, the upcoming exhibition at Marseille’s big museum, the MUCEM, is supposed to be on France’s history of rurality. I met with the programmer to discuss the project. He mentioned nothing on PACA nor anything contemporary: the exhibition is primarily an archival display of France’s broader farming history. According to the programmer, the exhibition provides no microphone to present farmers as cultural contributors, nor does it attempt to treat agriculture itself as culture (it’s the damn root!).

Whenever the microphone does reach farmers, it is to speak of political disenfranchisement and, naturally, their alleged affinity for the far right. The sentiment of being “left behind” continues to dominate the rural narrative, with slim artistic attempts to speak about agriculture via the voice of the countryside itself.

Quartiers Nord - Collective Gardens

For any non-French reader of this letter, Marseille’s quartiers Nord can best be equated to the projects, large social-housing estates whose residents have long been subject to similar forms of urban stigma and political neglect, though the histories are by no means one-to-one. These uniform buildings representing one third of the city’s surface were the result of a speed-build mission by former mayor Gaston Deferre in the 1950s and 60s. With the center of the city leveled by WWII bombings, the grand, fast, and barebones budgeted construction of subsidized housing came out of urban urgency. Years down the line, Algerian repatriates were sent in, and in tandem with the decolonization wave of the mid-to-late twentieth century, so were other immigrant populations at large.

Beyond geographical vastness, these quartiers Nord hold a significant space in French (and international) media’s imaginary as one of the country’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. Recall all the previously mentioned rhetoric around drug trafficking, delinquents, and depoliticization that surrounds Marseille’s ragged reputation? I invite you, reader, to go to YouTube (upon completing this read) and type “quartiers nord Marseille”. You’ll get the gist: rarely are the diverse communities themselves given a chance in mainstream media to be the subjects of their own narrative.

What the clichés obscure is any recognition of those acting in response to the shortcomings of the city or state to address the needs of the implicated communities.

To note: the focus of the series is on collective gardens founded within the quartiers, by their inhabitants, not as greenwashing initiatives transplanted by outsiders. Within the infrastructural gaps are people at work, taking initiative to fill in the top-down blank spaces because they too have skin in the game. Mutual aid has been the modus operandi that defines how neighborhoods undergoing urban neglect — in France and the States alike — foster a living form of politics that functions outside the centralized system. Ironically, these are the same neighborhoods treated as “political deserts” in the mainstream narrative given their absence from standard civic life.

Against this backdrop, what happens when we contemplate care? When we locate such gestures touching soil?

For context, this was my original research two years ago when I considered doing a master’s degree in anthropology in Marseille. Via secondary literature, I was led to Terre d’Entraide, a collective garden founded by Samia and her late husband Yazid Bendaif in the cité of Saint Barthélemy, a housing complex within the quartiers Nord in 2016.

Shortly before his passing, Yazid said in an interview with French ecological magazine Vert: “The vast majority of the good things happening in our neighborhoods go unnoticed. We’re stigmatized. The earth has become a tool to combat that: we use it to build connections between people who, under normal circumstances, would never have met.”

I met the incredible Samia last month — in the heavenly garden :). Despite having zero gardening experience prior to 2016, Samia cannot remember the last time she purchased food. She eats what she grows! And she continues to run Terre d’Entraide solo, as a shared garden and in collaboration with associations in the neighborhoods, in her late husband’s honor and spirit.

Immigrant Farm Workers

The underbelly topic that keeps emerging from the encounters I’ve had since arriving in France is the opaque reality of immigrant farm work.

I recall a conversation with a French friend where I asked whether there was potential to look at similarities between cheap, exploitable agricultural labor in France and the States. My friend responded that the countries weren’t really comparable: in France, there isn’t the same dependency on migrant labor as in the States. Only French folk work in French fields.

Lo and behold: this could not be further from the truth.

The ICE raids that came to a horror movie head in the summer of 2025 triggered an uncomfortable wake-up call for most Americans — not only around the hypocrisy of the US government’s deportation fanaticism (quite literally biting the hand that feeds you), but also around our collective normalization of farm workers’ legal precarity. It takes little research to verify the structure we all actively take part in, let alone sustain, through our comfortably discomforting awareness: brown bodies work in fields for white folk. They work in fields despite horrifying heat. They are paid pennies. They live in housing conditions comparable to cattle. This reality is ethically disconcerting, but not shocking.

And so: we eat, we chew, we swallow.

Turns out, France shares a strikingly similar structure, insofar as farms depend on seasonal migrant labor following what French agronomist Jean-Pierre Berlan has called the “California model” [CITE]. The difference lies in how little this dependency makes it into public knowledge. The bodies who sustain the patrimonial pride that is French agriculture are not in fact French.

Then… where are they from?

One of my first nights in Marseille, I saw a friend who had recently completed her civic service working with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) on the health of undocumented agricultural workers in the southeast of France. She told me:

“Finally, my Spanish was useful.”

“Spanish, how so?”

“Most of the workers were coming from Ecuador and El Salvador. By way of Spain.”

To summarize the research takeaways that followed this bomb drop:

1) There is a rampant lack of knowledge on the source of agricultural labor in France — particularly outside the worlds of agricultural labor, academia and activism. Workers are recruited directly from Moroccan villages; organizations such as Labora Terra recruit Latin American workers through Spain; seasonal agricultural work is increasingly organized across borders that the produce itself never acknowledges.

2) The conditions in which these workers live and work are brutal, and the precarity of their legal status makes it exceptionally difficult to refute such mistreatment. Therefore, the current agricultural system does not just depend on migrant labor; it depends on a workforce whose vulnerability can be systematically exploited with little to no repercussions.

3) French politics and media work to keep this exploitation out of the country’s cultural imaginary. Agriculture carries enormous political clout, particularly as political parties position themselves ahead of the 2027 elections and court their electoral base. Migrant workers, meanwhile, occupy the double margin: indispensable to the system, yet voiceless within it.

This all speaks to the current migrant policy landscape in most Western countries where migrants’ presence remains an invasion from which we must somehow be rid.  The irony is as rich as it is dire: those cultivating the roots that feed us are treated as societal weeds.

Who are the ones feeding us?

Who is taking care of the hands that feed us?

—

The anthropologist Anna Tsing has also been a big inspiration for Fouràco. In her book on matsutake mushroom foraging, The Mushroom At the End of the World, she writes:  “We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. […] It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.” 

By working at Lulu, we discovered a lens that has allowed us to pay attention to people, places, and yes, produce, in ways we hadn’t conceived of prior. This angle has helped us make sense of a world aflame a little more digestibly (no pun intended).

We want to make films and have a capacity to make them. We’ve also grown an audience willing to watch. The least we can do is share this angle that’s made us give a deeper damn and mobilize it as a platform for stories that merit a million microphones (beyond simply ours).

We’re not claiming to be the first to tell these stories nor to be THE ones who can do them justice. We are one piece of the bigger fight.

As it stands, our battle entails bearing witness to those tugging roots and touching soil.

So… where do we go from here?

All Fouràco work thus far has been done A to Z with our own personal funds.

This was somewhat feasible up until this point as we milked every resource and time slot accessible within our limited means (i.e.: Malik and I meeting in the morning at the restaurant before anyone arrived to edit, after every shift to edit at the bar down the street where Dalton would play jazz, running around the entire goddamn city pre-premiere to hand flyers out in any space that would allow it)… we did this all out of pocket :D!

Now, the project has grown — as have the stakes. I wrote this extensive ramble not to torture you (if you’ve gotten this far, I applaud you!) but to paint the picture of why this matters and emphasize that it’s not an idea floating in the abstract.

We viscerally believe in the purpose and potential of this series outside of our little Lulu ecosystem.

That said, we need your help. And in a day and age where cultural funds are being cut left, right, and center (in the States and France (indeed!) alike)… independent financing increasingly comes as the sole means of survival.

So… this is a letter, a ramble, and a reaching out to you, planting a seed to contribute to our Fouràco campaign in whatever means that you can in order for us to take The Hands Who Feed Us to the next stage: a) filming the pilot (and bringing Malik over!) and b) pitching it for wider distribution (the big dream being a channel on art and agriculture).

It’s thanks to our community of friends, family, coworkers, regulars, and arbitrary encounters that we managed to get this far (a full feature, zero-budget documentary ! Done ! Screened at the bloody Billy Wilder Theater!).

We thank you infinitely for carrying us then, and infinitely and beyond for helping us carry this forward now.

We will be actively sharing research accumulated thus far throughout the course of the campaign. We invite you to stay tuned for articles, art, clips, interviews, video essays … all the findings we forage in the meantime:)

Love,

Caroline (on behalf of Fouràco Collective)