‘Seeds’ Review: Nine Years in the Making, a Film as Patient and Persevering as the Black Farmers It Documents
A languid, loving portrait of Black farmers in the South, “Seeds” is a mixture of celebration and lament. Family farming has been endangered, but for African American farmers, the land — holding onto it, cultivating it — is even more precarious and precious. Considering recent, breakneck attempts to gut civil rights, director Brittany Shyne’s debut feature — which won the U.S. documentary prize at the Sundance Film Festival — feels elegiac.
A requiem is not the filmmaker’s intention, however. With the patience of a sower, Shyne lets the lives of her subjects unfold gently over two hours. She filmed for nine years, following farm families as they went about their hardscrabble labor, as well as the work of community. Although there are urgent economic and political challenges facing these families, this isn’t muckraking cinema. Instead, the filmmaker hews to the quotidian, the weekly, the annual. Shot in black and white, this portrait of a people is affecting and achy.
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“Seeds” begins in the company of an elder headed to a church for a homegoing. Starting with a funeral procession establishes the life cycles of family and community — not unlike the lesson Clara Williams imparts sitting in a car to her grandniece about where the body in the hearse ahead of them might be going.
Clara and her siblings inherited land that was owned and worked by their great-grandfather, Charles Cokrell. Having been in the family since 1883, the farm is a designated Centennial farm because it’s been in their family for more than 100 years. Clara’s sister Belle appears here, but it is the oldest living Williams, Carlie, who makes “Seeds” especially touching.
The octogenarian still drives. Still takes his burlap bags of pecans to market. After he heads to the cashier, Carlie visits an optometrist. Whether these events happened in succession, the juxtaposition is pointed and poignant. (Malika Zouhali-Worrall edited.) We surmise he made only a little selling his pecans; the pressure of paying for new glasses is palpable. “I ain’t feeling my best today, to tell you the truth,” he tells the optician’s assistant, fishing for his supplemental insurance card.
Shyne, who is also the cinematographer, finds terrific beauty in Carlie’s face with its weepy eyes and silvered hair peeking out from his cap. He touches his face with his hands often, as if to make sure he’s still there.
It’s easy to fear that the rural community like many throughout the nation is primarily made up of older folks and the very young. But from time to time, younger men make an appearance: tending a controlled burn of underbrush, separating peas and wrangling cattle that have escaped through a hole.
When the camera takes a pause from its characters, it is as intentional as the decision to present this portrait in monochrome: It’s the way the movie inhales. A cotton harvester lumbers toward the camera. Tractors and other equipment stand in a yard. The score is spare, more sound design (by Daniel Timmons and Ben Kruse) than music. The near silences are fulsome: A light wind rustles a pine tree, and corn husks make that unmistakable scratching sound. Midway through the film, a scene of cotton being harvested and shaped into a trailer-length bale is underscored by a deep grumbling that suggests machinery, and vocals that hint at spirit (original music by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe).
Farming on his own, Willie Head Jr. pulls corn, fills buckets and feeds his cows. The labor can be ceaseless. A knee brace is as much a sign of his occupation as his straw hat. Yet, he finds time to tend to his great-granddaughter, Alani, and her infant brother. He brings out a picture of his mother to show the filmmaker. “She reminds me of my mother every day,” he says of Alani (who is not impressed).
Head is amiable in his matter-of-factness. He inherited the farm from his grandfather and his bond to the land is absolute. When we later find out he is an activist, it doesn’t come as a surprise. There’s a can-do pragmatism to him.
Outside a General Dollar store, Head meets a pastor who mentions seeing him in Atlanta, protesting the distribution of farm subsidies. It’s the film’s midpoint and the first we learn of Head’s activism. Later he works the phone on behalf of Black farmers, even going to Washington, D.C., for a March 2023 protest of Joe Biden’s and the USDA. It’s hard to watch “Seeds,” and to wonder what will happen to their efforts under the Trump Administration.
Head’s part of the film could rightly have ended with anger and frustration. Instead, we walk with him down a dirt road. In the distance, a stand of pine borders a field. “Somehow I had the foreseeability to see it coming — walking over to my children’s house,” he says with a pride that isn’t arrogant but earned. “I kind of foresaw this day,” he adds. Later when his great-grandson is sitting in the grass, he says, “When we be up there fighting for the land, this is what the image be in my mind.”
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