The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) is fully underway this year, and I’ve been watching just about as many films as I can. Out of all the films I’ve seen however, there was one that stood out far beyond the rest. “Seeds” is a documentary film about black farming families in Georgia, and it is absolutely one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. Full disclosure, this review will contain “spoilers,” but also, it’s a documentary, and this review will take nothing away from your viewing experience.
The title of the film hit me immediately while watching it, and I naively thought it was only a double meaning. After hours of reflection however more and more depth and nuance hit me, and I realized very quickly that the film I had just watched was so much deeper than surface level.
Looking at the film from a familial perspective, “seeds” takes on a beautiful meaning. Watching these farmers plant their seeds in the ground, quite literally growing a future for their children while simultaneously watching them raise the next generation, planting the seeds of knowledge that will bloom in a figurative light, was not only visually stunning but emotionally poignant.
But digging deeper, seeds in inherently about the struggles and history facing black farmers in the United States. Throughout the film, you follow one farmer as he corresponds with the Department of Agriculture, trying to secure a financial future for himself and his family as his farm slowly chugs along. But because of historic and systematic discrimination, he is quite literally unable to even afford the seeds he needs to plant his crops for the season.
To me this reached at the much stronger message that this film gave to me. As he quite literally can not afford the seeds to grow his crop, he is going to be met with diminishing returns in the next planting season. This mirrors the struggles that the farmers were systematically facing by the US government. Their lack of support for black farmers has metaphorically withheld the seeds from them, slowly hurting each generation over the course of the entirety of US history.
But even on the most surface level this film is stunning, it is genuinely unlike any documentary film I have ever seen before. This film is able to capture such genuine and personal perspectives on the people it’s portraying in a way I’ve never seen before. You truly get to know each person in this film, not by them telling you about themselves, but instead through living with them through the duration of the runtime.
The cinematography in this film is grounded and alive, pulling the viewer along as the camera passes through every scene in this film. It’s all in black and white, a decision that I always question before seeing a film, but in “seeds” it is so perfectly done that I question how any other films can justify being black and white as much as this one can.
When “seeds” comes to a town near you, it’s your sign to watch it. It has fundamentally altered my perception of what a documentary should be, and it was able to do it all while just being itself.
