Seeds

As both director and cinematographer, debut filmmaker Brittany Shyne immerses the viewer in the absorbing rhythms and intimate materiality of African-American farm life in Georgia. Shyne’s patient, poetic eye and ear attune to one farmer’s tender attention to his great granddaughter, alongside the sights and sounds of a community’s honest day’s work—repurposing spent corn cobs for feed, shelling pecans for market, the profound rumble of a massive cotton harvester. As the story of dwindling government support for Black farmers unfolds, exquisite black-and-white imagery lovingly captures the rough-worn hands, faces, and tools-of-trade of octogenarian patriarchs fighting to preserve their family legacies and century-old homesteads.

 “Gorgeous… [a] must-see… an incredibly rewarding journey, a film indebted to the past that feels brilliantly alive.”– IndieWire

 “A LYRICAL, SUNDANCE-PRIZE WINNING DEBUT… A languid, loving portrait of Black farmers in the South, SEEDS is a mixture of celebration and lament. Family farming has been endangered, but for African American farmers, the land—holding onto it, cultivating it—is even more precarious and precious.”– Variety