Here at True/False Film Festival, documentary as a form reigns supreme. Located in the Midwestern college town of Columbia, Missouri, True/False always brings an assortment of non-fiction films world premiering at the festival, joined by others hailing from Sundance other prestige doc fests. This first dispatch is a replica of that formula, covering three films guided by a curiosity with man’s relationship to the nature, whether by farming, destroying or mining. Each work, in its own way, is a plea for the earth, and those who love it, to be heard.
It is inherently poetic and powerful to see Black folks farming land they own. In director Brittany Shyne’s hypnotically soulful film “Seeds,” a group of older, Southern Black farmers are trying to hold onto a way of life that was so long ago was promised by the edict of “forty acres and a mule” and now is being slowly taken away. It is no accident to see Shyne bookend her film with funerals, signaling a new generation tasked with protecting its inheritance.
“Seeds” is as tangible as an autumn leaf, crisp and crunchy, the story of its life visible on its surface. Shyne, who’s also the film’s cinematographer, follows Black families owning cotton fields, growing corn, and raising cattle. Their land is lush, even if their circumstances are increasingly becoming dire. For decades, through systemic racism, the Black folks who didn’t migrate north long ago have been losing their farmland to banks. These Black farmers have been demanding the Department of Agriculture, during the Joe Biden presidency, honor their promise by supporting them with the same subsidies received by white farmers. Charged phone calls by these proud Black men, particularly Willie Head Jr, against a spineless bureaucracy animate a struggle that if lost, will lead to the immediate erasure of wealth. These farmers are not monetarily rich, but the land, by virtue of being passed down, provides a corridor toward generational sustainability for future descendants.
In a film brimming with so much vitality, one might find Shyne’s choice of black and white photography to be perplexing. Her decision, however, recalls the textured scholarship of Zora Neale Hurston’s Fieldwork footage, wherein the anthropologist ventured to Black rural communities during the 1920s to record Black life. Similarly, Shyne surveys the farming, churchgoing and everyday activities of this community. She also captures the lessons older farmers are trying to impart on their younger counterparts. Most of all, she touches the ingrained rhythms and sensorial splendor of the people she sees. I felt like I have known or have met some version of every one of these men and women, people who rise with the sun, dressing for work even on their day off–donning a cap, a plaid button up shirt, and some slacks—and watch the news before they begin their day. Their accented pacing, their speech punctuated by an “mhm,” is a world of meaning and feelings, and bonds with long-departed kin articulated with precision.
There is no part of “Seeds” that doesn’t feel like a priceless heirloom, like a window into a critical cultural history that must be maintained or lest be permanently lost.
The more you watch Sasha Wortzel’s hard-biting, personal environmental essay “River of Grass,” the more you realize that Miami is man’s folly. While the film isn’t connected to Kelly Reichardt’s same-titled debut feature, it is referring to the same area: The Florida Everglades. The national park’s moniker derives from local Indigenous tribes, and later formed the title of conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ 1947 non-fiction study The Everglades: River of Grass. In that book, Douglas observed the natural balance struck by the wispy fauna, the slow-moving reptiles and vivid birds, and the necessary geology of the area to provide fresh water by working in concert with hurricanes. It was after one destructive hurricane, in fact, that Wortzel had a dream about Douglas that would inspire her to make this film.
Wortzel’s film is a clarion call to protect Florida’s greatest resource. Wortzel, a native of the Everglades, whose elegiac narration recalls her childhood in the area, follows other groups similarly hoping for action. Like the Everglades’ flipping tides, she switches between archival interviews with Douglas and contemporary verité footage of Miccosukee educator Betty Osceola, who’s leading prayer walks to flag the destruction instigated by humans. Wortzel easily bends time through a tight edit that demonstrates the long struggles that still continues today.
Though Wortzel’s film is winking and wondrous—cinematographer J. Bennett captures the bewitching watery landscape with reverence—this isn’t a passive narrative. Wortzel also observes a Black mother working to minimize the pollution wrought by the burning of sugar canes, a mother-and-daughter who are working to clear invasive pythons from the ecosystem, and worried fishermen who are finding less to catch. All of these anxieties, as we find, can be traced back to the overpopulation of land not meant for a major city, which is putting a strain on an environment at-risk of rising toxins and increasingly deadly weather events.
Wortzel is hoping against hope that we wake up and move to restrike nature’s balance rather than continuing to build high-rises and airports where there should be none. Because if the Everglades is the pot of slowly boiling water, and we and its animals are the frogs, then we’re all nearly cooked.
Another aquatic-themed documentary is writer/director Eleanor Mortimer’s mournful yet exciting deep-sea exploration film “How Deep Is Your Love.” Sailing on a vessel toward the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone, which is located twelve days from any land, Mortimer trains her camera to biologists who are attempting to discover and catalogue the rare, never-before-seen ecosystem threatened by deep-sea mining. We see luminescent, alien-like creatures with funny names: Barbie Pig, Prickly Pear, Wedding Dress Star, Psychedelic Elvis Worm, The King, and more—filmed with a grandiosity befitting their uncommon beauty. The scientists aboard the ship, who monitor and explore in shifts designed for 24-hour observation, are always left in awe, as though they’ve discovered that angels are real.
Why is this delicate, undisturbed ecosystem under threat? Because the seabed, apart from being “the last frontier of human discovery,” as Mortimer surmises, is populated by metal-rich nodules often applied to power “green” energy. Mortimer pinpoints our initial hunger for these slow-growing minerals to the HMS Challenger’s 1858 expedition and discovery of deep-sea life, which began proposing how these ancient beings and objects could further humankind. Mortimer also turns her gaze to the International Seabed Authority, who, in their newest session, are tasked with designing rules for mining the internationally designated area.
In the lyrically gorgeous imagery of “How Deep Is Your Love” is gnawing tension. Mortimer’s Mark Cousins-esque narration is distanced, yet ethereal. The scientists, on the other hand, are enthralled and heartbroken. For them to examine these creatures, they must snatch them away from the seabed toward the surface, using a cold, apathetic metal claw, where upon entry they immediately die in the unpressurized space.
How do you weigh the importance of science in the face of destroying, at times, a thousand-year-old organism? Mortimer is measured enough not to ask these biologists such a grave question. Instead, she observes the misplaced hope by one scientist that the now-deceased creature will be immortal. One could sneer at such feigned optimism, but that wish, when you think about it, is the only glimmer of solace in “How Deep Is Your Love,” a documentary where human inaction and industrialists’ craven lust for minerals will surely end multiple species including ours. In that sense, every moment of levity in Mortimer’s delicate film, even down to its title, could be considered gallows humor.
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