This documentary film asks whether a citizens' experiment, the CSA (Community-supported Agriculture), developing new partnership models between consumers and farmers, has the power to change society.
A group of citizens lobbied to save the landmark Alberta Wheat Pool grain elevator, one of the defining features of Mayerthorpe’s landscape, from being torn down in 2003 - as thousands of others had been. This film documents those efforts while exploring the broader history and significance of the grain elevator.
Farm families in Lestock, Saskatchewan, have pooled their resources so that rising operating costs will not drive them off their land. By pooling their land, their equipment, their livestock, and farming as a cooperative, they are able to live as they choose, to maintain their standard of living, and even to have some spare time left over to enjoy. An engaging look at a novel approach to big-scale farming.
In 1980, Jack Shae and Allen Moore, two ethnographic filmmakers from Harvard University, moved their families to the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides. Over the course of 18 months they documented the everyday lives and struggles of the crofters they lived among, whom were even then a vanishing breed. The film is in English and Gaelic. This carefully observed documentary by filmmakers Jack Shae and Allen Moore is a poetic ethnographic film in the style of their mentor, Robert Gardner (“Dead Birds”). It follows the rhythm of life on a wind-swept island in the Outer Hebrides through the four seasons and in the filmmakers’ observation of the day-to-day struggles of a vanishing society we see the deep-time legacy of their kind. The film is in English and Gaelic.
Railroad of Hope consists of interviews and footage collected over three days by Ning Ying of migrant agricultural workers traveling from Sichuan in China's interior, to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China's northwest frontier.[1] Through informal interviews aboard the cramped rail cars, Ning Ying explores the hopes and dreams of the workers, many of whom have never left their homes before.
The cultivation of flax, long and complicated, requires constant precautions and care. This document describes the different stages of this culture, from tillage and fertilization of the soil to uprooting, retting, braying, stacking, retting and, finally, shipping to the factory.