There’s plenty to love about Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, a moving, bucolic look at members of African American families that have for generations tilled the fields of farms they control on lands their ancestors were once forced through slavery to work. The film unfolds in ways both subtle and overt, navigating a liminal space where the ghosts of past traumas amplify the tenacity of those still there, and the challenges of the present and near future illustrate battles yet to be won.
Crafted over almost a decade using a striking black-and white-palate, the opening shot is of a funeral, the kind of homecoming that’s both musical and moving, a rapt yet engaging metaphor for the coming together of the community, as well as the way that the past is constantly handing off to the present. We are first introduced to Clara Williams, riding in a car with her grandniece and handing out hard candies while bestowing wisdom and humor in equal measure. We witness directly the intertwining of what has long been on the land and those whose daunting task it is to one day take up the mantle, the transmission of multi-generational knowledge being articulated in real time.
‘Seeds’ Shines the Light on One Family’s Fight to Farm the Land of Their Ancestors

Image Via The Sundance Institute 

Clara family has owned these particular plots since the late 19th century, mere decades after the post-Civil War emancipation acts when the very right of land ownership was sanctioned for members of this community. These so-called centennial farms, marking more than a century having been tilled under the same family, are increasingly rare throughout the U.S. as the agricultural business has been overtaken by conglomerates and factory farms, but the forces affecting those within the African American community are that much more challenging. Having lived through Jim Crow periods and other more subtle yet no less insidious forms of institutional racism, the battle continues for things as direct as government grants, where the members of Clara’s family vocally and effectively advocate that even under the supposedly sympathetic agenda of Biden’s presidency, they’re forced to fight for assistance in ways that some of their white neighbors seemingly have an easier time with.
The film is entirely focused on the perspective of these families, so hearing from those surrounding these farms is the subject of another project. This is not to say that there’s too narrow a view in Shyne’s telling, simply that rather than grander, perhaps journalistically minded accounts, she’s focused very much on these particular individuals, hearing their voices and amplifying their concerns throughout.
‘Seeds’ Provides a Tightly Focused Story with a Much Broader Impact

Image Via Sundance Film Festival

What’s perhaps lost from a larger, more holistic perspective has the benefit of providing deep intimacy with the many subjects, allowing the viewer to feel very much a fly on the wall of deeply personal and unguarded conversations. This is the benefit of those years living and working with these family members, where the filmmaker disappears to a certain extent as we see everything from the repair of floor joists after a contractor dropped the ball, a new generation being brought up in houses newly built on parts of the historic land, or even more political actions including a visit to Washington D.C. to advocate for more equity in the distribution of funds.
Seen in the stark light of the most recent political transition, any of the uncertainties these farmers felt under the previous administration are amplified by the shifting landscape we’re experiencing to this day. The film of course has an end point, but the stories are so engaging, their present and future so in flux, that it would greatly benefit from a follow-up every so often, something akin to the Up series of documentaries that traced over many years the same individuals as their own lives shifted.

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This sense of a larger timeline is what injects the film with much of its power. The central metaphor that gives it its title speaks to the cycle of life and rebirth exemplified by these seemingly small kernels that, by their very nature, can either be left to be fallow or eventually grow and flourish until the time new seeds are collected to keep the cycle going.
‘Seeds’ Is Quiet and Poetic and yet Still Engaging and Powerful

While its quiet, almost poetic pace may be off-putting for some, there’s a certain kind of grace in the slowness that matches perfectly the rural lives of these individuals. Seeds eschews the need for grand revelations in favor of the practice of a more diligent and in-depth gaze, mirroring again the very process of farming whereby beyond the grand flourishes of harvest and the like, the majority of time is spent in the consistency of engagement hour after hour, day after day, season after season.
On the one hand, Seeds provides a unique glimpse into one family’s joys and struggles, while on the other it delves delicately yet effectively into larger questions of policy, politics, the scars of the past, and the challenges of the present. Beautifully told and presented, it’s a film that at once invites us to look more closely at the quiet expressions and glances that say more than common lines of dialogue. It also allows us to more fully understand both the remarkable tenacity and the everyday strength of Clara and her family, and how this one plot of land can literally contain multitudes; a constituent part that within holds so much of the story of what America has been, and what, if the cycle keeps going, will continue to be long into the future.
Seeds premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Seeds

Powerful and poetic film patiently explores the plight of a family of farmers

Release Date

January 25, 2025

Pros & Cons

Powerful look at a family of farmers.
Beautiful black and white photography gives approporiate grandeur to the storytelling.
Intimate and informative.

Lugubrious pace may be a challenge for some.