“Folks say you’re too young to have a great granddaughter,” Willie Head Jr. says of himself, watching over his own in “Seeds,” but as he explains later on in Brittany Shyne’s resplendent black-and-white portrait of his family farm, he wouldn’t see much use for the property if it didn’t have generations of his kin running around it. His own grandfather dug up tree stumps for a dime a piece to put a down payment on the acreage and he can’t imagine anything but continuing to invest in it in any way he can, grimacing at the thought of anyone who would rather be “locked up in an apartment complex across the country when they could be out on the land.” He proudly holds up a picture of his mother and asks how much her great-great granddaughter bears a resemblance, surely hoping a similar scene could play out a generation or two down the road.
However, there are fewer Black-owned farms such as Head’s, which as he notes at one point covered 16 million acres in the South in the years following reconstruction. Now, that number is less than two million, and while Shyne keeps the focus of her debut feature squarely on the remarkable resilience and effort it takes to keep any agricultural concern like this up and running, it illuminates how in a business with incredibly tight margins to begin with, the Black community is more likely to get squeezed.
Still, “Seeds” impressively resists any easy classification, particularly avoiding the dreaded “issue film” tag, as it fully immerses audiences in the lives of the Head family. Opening at a funeral that notably isn’t meant to feel like a sad event as a choir boisterously performs with soul behind an open casket, the occasion is really a marker of legacy as is the scene that follows as a pair of farmers cut and collect cotton, both comfortably seated in giant trucks to do so. Yet this isn’t to suggest the Heads have it easy, as its current patriarch is introduced feeding corn cobs to his cows that he grew himself, not wanting to waste anything when the cost of any outside resources can be crushing, and it can’t help but seem like a metaphor for the whole estate when he is seen attempting to fix the foundation of a house on the property, owing to the poor work of an outsider contractor he won’t mention by name, but as he talks generally about being taken advantage of, you have a pretty good idea for why.
It takes roughly an hour for “Seeds” to snap into focus as Shyne creates something truly sensational to draw you in, spending time with various members of the Head family and roaming around the farm where scenes of work are all filmed by the director herself with a marvelous energy behind them. The Heads resourcefully park a John Deere tractor under a pecan tree to shake its fruits loose and scenes of picking and packing black-eyed peas and transporting watermelons shows a real connection between the people doing the labor and all that it takes physically and mentally just for a piece of produce to arrive at a market. Sound designers Daniel Timmons and Ben Kruse make the environments quite tactile bringing out the nature around and editor Malika Zouhali-Worrall’s patience with each individual scene allow them to become engrossing. By the time you’re hanging on every word, Head Jr. is stopped outside a Dollar General by a local pastor who wants to ask if it was him he saw at a protest regarding farm subsidies, to which Head Jr. replies, “A lot of people don’t know what’s going on.”
Suddenly, an arcane situation involving the disbursement of federal assistance to farmers in the American Rescue Plan passed into law in 2021 doesn’t seem so distant, nor does an entire history of the deeply unfair obstacles that have stymied Black farmers for centuries. Only one end of the conversation needs to be heard to be understood as Head Jr. spends time on the phone with government employees about how he’s had to pinch pennies on buying seeds for crops, a mindfulness that isn’t required of his white counterparts who have been receiving their benefits without incident, and while the family’s resilience is deeply admirable, it also painfully looks like it should be unnecessary when they’re putting as much into the business, if not more, than anyone else and seeing such a limited return. That ends up being the only investment of time and energy that ever seems questionable in “Seeds,” which manages to be a landmark all on its own.
“Seeds” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next play at True/False in Columbia, Missouri on February 27th at 9:30 pm at the Rhynsburger, February 28th at 6:45 pm at the Blue Note and March 2nd at 9 am at the Missouri Theatre.