In her Oscar-shortlisted new documentary, “Seeds”, director Brittany Shyne depicts the lives of Black farmers in the South.  In a flexible verité style in which she doesn’t fear breaking the fourth wall, Shyne pays meticulous attention to the workings of farm life, focussing, as she notes to Mike, literally on the hands that do that labor.  But she sets the entire experience with a broader framework of the “maintenance of legacy and [what] that entails” within the “political and social structures” which inform the lives of these farmers.

The resulting film becomes a meditation on relationships:  Between the members of the community, of course, but also between: people and the land; people and machines; people and animals; and between people and their own bodies and mortality.

Hidden Gem:

“Handsworth Songs”

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