Three family-owned farms on the Delmarva Peninsula and their success using practices that protect and promote healthy soil; practices that also safeguard working lands against the extremes posed by climate change.
Short documentary about the Oxcroft Land Settlement near Bolsover. Between 1934 and 1939, the Land Settlement Association (LSA) established 1,100 smallholdings within 26 settlements across the country, the objective of which was to re-settle unemployed workers and their families (mainly miners at Oxcroft) and get them working and producing on the land. The film examines ideas of food production, environment and community through the eyes of current residents, some of whom moved onto the estate at its inception in 1936 as the children of original settlers and have never left.
It depicts the establishment of kolkhoz (collective farming) in Bukhara. Poor dehkans are oppressed by bays and emir. One of them, unable to bear the slave labor, flees from his native land. A few years later, the fugitive returns and becomes an activist of the collective farm movement. Kulaks kill him and try to flood the collective farm fields with water. However, collective farmers stop the sabotage and reveal the secret of the murdered activist. The perpetrators are justifiably punished.
One of the great pleasures of working on LOOK & SEE was collaborating with artist and wood engraver Wesley W. Bates. Wesley's work has long accompanied Wendell Berry's poetry. When he agreed to provide original images for our film we were truly thrilled. Because each image involves such painstaking effort, we asked Wesley to film a block from start to finish. At two hours long, the video is a distillation of three days of his effort. And Wesley provided over ten such engravings along with the film's signature block of Wendell Berry.
As the international consumption of quinoa rises. The Mother Grain looks at how this increasing demand is affecting quinoa farmers. Bear Witness Pictures traveled to the Bolivian quinoa-growing communities surrounding the world's largest salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni, witnessing their lives first-hand to tell the story of quinoa from the perspective of the farmers themselves.
This Emmy award-winning documentary chronicles a vanishing piece of Americana: the last remaining agricultural encampment fair in the country, and the families who spend months preparing for this unique rural phenomenon.
Modern British dairy farms must get bigger and bigger or go under but Farmer Stephen Hook decides to buck the trend. Instead he chooses to have a great relationship with his small herd of cows and ignore the big supermarkets and dairies. The result is a laugh-out-loud emotional roller-coaster of a film, a heart warming tearjerker about the incredible bonds between man, animal and countryside in a fast disappearing England.
A dramatization of Canadian author W.O. Mitchell's penetrating story about the racial prejudice encountered by a Polish immigrant farmer in a rural Saskatchewan community.
Facing seizure of their own lands, two families found themselves farming together on the same field, hoping to get through just another rice-farming season like every year. But no matter how much the world is evolving, how much the country is going through economic, political and social changes, they still cannot grasp that ideology of happiness.
A documentary about Swiss mountain folk.
In 1979, Louis Malle traveled into the heart of Minnesota to capture the everyday lives of the men and women in a prosperous farming community. Six years later, during Ronald Reagan's second term, he returned to find drastic economic decline. Free of stereotypes about America's "heartland," GOD'S COUNTRY, commissioned for American public television, is a stunning work of emotional and political clarity.
This documentary film follows farmers and activists fighting together to stop the Indiana Enterprise Center, a mega-sized industrial park planned west of South Bend, Indiana
The short drama film Dòst tells the tough coming of age process of best friends Alko and Björn in a small rural village community. Between agricultural weekend work and partying, dealing with other adolescent boys and girls, one kiss can make a big difference. The urge to fit in, to uphold image, and peer pressure makes the boys both having to make choices that will affect their friendship.
The Fruit Hunters explores the little known subculture and history of rare fruit hunters who travel the globe in an obsessive search for the exotic, in this stylish and sometimes erotic documentary.
Ever since it was revealed that the chocolate industry is involved with child slavery in the Ivory Coast, the industry has been busy – due to consumer demands – explaining what exactly it does to actively fight trafficking and child labour. But does the industry live up to its own promises?In this investigative film, director Miki Mistrati tries to find out, if the chocolate industry – which is one of the largest corporations in the world – speak the truth, when they say that they provide education, medical care etc for the children of the Ivory Coast. But the project runs into trouble already from the get-go, because the embassy of the Ivory Coast won’t let Miki enter the country until he has an invitation – from the chocolate industry.
This film weaves together expert analysis of America's food and farming system with a powerful narrative of one extraordinary farmer who is determined to create a sustainable future for his community.
Set in a small farming community in mid Wales, a place where Koppel's parents - both refugees - found a home. This is a landscape and population that is changing rapidly as small scale agriculture is disappearing and the generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out. Much influenced by his conversations with the writer Peter Handke, the film maker leads us on a poetic and profound journey into a world of endings and beginnings; a world of stuffed owls, sheep and fire.
Sweet, chubby, theatrical Billy was never cut out to be a farmer or a rugby player, but as the only son of a ‘good kiwi bloke’ he’s obliged to try. The cows are stubborn and the chores gruelling but Billy finds escape in a fantasy world playing Lana, heroine of his favourite TV show Adventures in Space. Not everyone approves of Billy's transformation. On the brink of adolescene, he discovers growing up is more complicated than he could ever have imagined.