Seeds

Intimate, epic, and lyrical, Seeds chronicles the lives of a community of Black farmers who have toiled on their land for over a century in the American South. From cotton harvesters rolling across the fields to men pulling corn, wrangling cattle, or bringing burlap bags of pecans to the market, the film poetically shows the eternal rhythms of farm life, at the same time as it reveals the precarity of the farmers’ plight. Trucks are in disrepair; banks refuse to lend them money; and promised federal funds aren’t reaching them. Still, they persist, driven by a duty to their ancestors, their children, and the need to maintain freedom in an increasingly challenging world.

Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, Seeds is a tribute to the determination of filmmaker Brittany Shyne and her subjects. Shot over nine years and presented in pristine black-and-white, Seeds presents a reverent, elegiac, and almost timeless vision of a waning way of life.

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