Brittany Shyne’s delicately laced documentary Seeds, which profiles a handful of Black farmers in the countryside of Georgia, announces itself through warmth and intimacy. No sooner has the film started that we are nestled inside the backseat of a car, as it shuttles to and from a family funeral at a Baptist church. As a grandmother explains the concept of heaven to her granddaughter, Shyne’s camera looks up from the backseat of the car, making us privy to the small and tender embrace of a familial love. Death, life, rebirth, progress, pride, hopefulness and sorrow, all themes which are communicated within minutes in this crisply shot, black and white portrait. Directly, Shyne’s film addresses the entrenched and systemic racial discrimination these generational farmers face and their righteous anger and disappointment towards President Biden, who failed to uphold some key promises he made to Black farmers on the campaign trail, but most of the film’s emotional heft comes to us through uncommon and highly focused images. Walter and Cary, two neighboring farmers, come across each other in beat-up old cars with cigarettes, in need of ashing, dangling from their lips like hay; close-ups of another farmer’s hands, Willie Jr.’s, reveal such weathered skin they almost look like leather gloves. The cumulative effect of such access is like pointilist cinema. Shyne is less concerned with a unified story, instead dipping in and out of her subject’s lives and in the process giving us a much more involved experience of a fading subculture. One of the pieces of these farmer’s stories that we hear is the slow disintegration of Black control over the land. In 1910, Black farmers owned 16 million acres of land; today that number is closer to 1.5 million. Ample evidence suggests that a huge part of this last century’s decline in ownership is due to political erasure. Willie Jr. talks about the days when his father had to dig up stumps for ten cents a piece to pay the down payment on the farm, and not much has changed for equity in the field; Black farmers get a shred of the federal funding their White counterparts receive, and no one in national government seems particularly pressed to argue on their behalf.
Yet, in spite of these heavier elements, Seeds is surprisingly tender, because of how much emphasis it places on the manual labor and passion of these workers.
Visually, Shyne’s film recalls the work of photographer Walker Evans, if shot on the other side of the tracks by documenting Black farmers who have had trouble mainting their livelihoods. But the film’s sparse dialogue and scoring, coupled with its underbelly of political suppression, recalls more forcefully the late Bela Tarr’s behemoth Sátántangó, as Seeds also depicts as it does a series of embattled country folk trying to push through life while they wait in slimming hope that the department of agriculture might fulfill their promises of subsidization. Yet, in spite of these heavier elements, Seeds is surprisingly tender, because of how much emphasis it places on the manual labor and passion of these workers. Between scenes in the fields, Charlie sees a doctor for cataracts, and the farmer’s wives make visits to the salon. Willie spends ample time with his granddaughter, Alani, lovingly comparing her to her mother.

Sparingly scored, Shyne’s film saves the music — a mix of haunting choral and clunking industrial sounds — for moments of grandiose creation. Most notable of these is a sequence in which a newly repaired cotton picking machine rolls through the overgrown grass with a rumbling confidence. The effect on us is keen. It tells us these are laborers whose larger moments of grand accomplishment are rare, moments solemnly seeded in intangibly small increments.
Seeds opens at the FIlm Forum in New York on January 16th.

Release Date

January 25, 2025

Runtime

125 minutes