The Ants and the Grasshopper (2021) Plot Summary Explained

The film opens in Bwabwa, where the Rukuru River has dried up, and villagers queue to draw water from a single hole. Chitaya says the rains now come only about three times a year, and the village women draw water from boreholes that take even longer to refill.

Chitaya and her husband, Christopher, farm one acre, growing maize, beans, cassava, pumpkins, and pigeon peas. She works with Soils, Food and Healthy Communities (SFHC), a local organisation co-founded by Esther Lupafya, which uses discussion groups and drama to promote organic farming methods and a fairer division of household work between men and women. Through SFHC she also promotes fuel-saving clay stoves and recipes that make use of new crops.

One strand follows the pair's efforts to win over a neighbour, Winston, who regards fetching water, washing dishes, and pounding maize as women's work. Chitaya recounts that her husband abducted her into marriage, ending her hope of becoming a nun, and that he has since come to share the farm and household work with her.

In the second half of the film, Chitaya and Lupafya travel to the United States, visiting Midwest farms and urban food cooperatives and meeting people in Iowa, Oakland, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. Among those they visit are the Rolling Acres Farm in Iowa and the Black Dirt Farm Collective in Maryland. An Iowa family of organic farmers, fellow Presbyterians, receive Chitaya sympathetically but are skeptical about climate change. Also in Iowa, the women meet a member of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network, an encounter the Eye for Film reviewer singled out as the film's most joyful. They spend only a short time with politicians, most of whom show little interest. By the end of the film, some of the farmers who had dismissed climate change begin to reconsider.

The film is narrated by Chitaya, who speaks in Tumbuka.