A documentary by Coline Serreau. In French and Portuguese with English subtitles. Unrated. Opens Friday, April 15, at the Vancity Theatre

“Whenever you go after a myth,” someone says in this frequently shocking doc, “there’s going to be trouble.”

The speaker is soil microbiologist Claude Bourguignon, and his challenge involves one of the most basic tools of modern farming: the plow. He refers to the use of heavy machinery as a kind of “pissing contest” that has little to do with practical agriculture and everything to do with the militaristic aggression that supplanted primarily female-centred food-production methods that prevailed for thousands of years before the combustion engine.

As you might expect from the title—a helluva lot catchier than the original, Solutions Locales Pour un Désordre Global—this engaging, if slightly padded, film is built around a bad-news/better-news dialectic. With a few musical montages added for relief, the journey through France, Morocco, India, Ukraine, and Brazil alternates between harrowing verbal descriptions of how we got here (short answer: First World War) and more hopeful examples of good folks working for change—especially in urban-rural collectives that cost almost nothing to start.

The film was written and directed by Coline Serreau, a veteran screenwriter responsible for the French movies that turned into the Three Men and a Baby franchise. She pushes the view that agribusiness is actively terrorizing the world’s remaining subsistence growers, and this is supported by articulate activist Vandana Shiva, plus many other scientists, NGO leaders, and former government officials from the countries mentioned. (No corporate flacks are heard, but they already own every other media outlet, don’t they?)

All you need to know is that 90 percent of available seeds—mostly land-poisoning hybrids—are doled out worldwide by five corporations, most of which started out making deadly chemicals for the world’s armies of invasion. That’s no myth, unfortunately.