Film Forum

Shortlisted for the 2026 Academy Award® for Documentary Feature Film

WINNER, U.S. DOCUMENTARY GRAND JURY PRIZE, 2025 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
NOMINEE, TRUER THAN FICTION AWARD, 2026 FILM INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARDS®

As both director and cinematographer, debut filmmaker Brittany Shyne immerses the viewer in the absorbing rhythms and intimate materiality of African-American farm life in Georgia. Shyne’s patient, poetic eye and ear attune to one farmer’s tender attention to his great granddaughter, alongside the sights and sounds of a community’s honest day’s work—repurposing spent corn cobs for feed, shelling pecans for market, the profound rumble of a massive cotton harvester. As the story of dwindling government support for Black farmers unfolds, exquisite black-and-white imagery lovingly captures the rough-worn hands, faces, and tools-of-trade of octogenarian patriarchs fighting to preserve their family legacies and century-old homesteads.

Presented with support from The Richard Brick, Geri Ashur, and Sara Bershtel Fund for Social Justice Documentaries and The Endowed Fund for Emerging Filmmakers
 
2025     123 MIN.     USA

Trailer

Reviews

“EXTRAORDINARILY BEAUTIFUL... its images feel so ageless that you could imagine [Shyne had] somehow gotten hold of a time machine and slipped back decades, witnessing Southern Black farmers and their families as they grow cotton and sing at church and spend a quiet afternoon at home. But though SEEDS is a lyrical portrait of a way of life, it also harbors an urgency that’s very much of our moment.”
– Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times

“Gorgeous... [a] must-see... an incredibly rewarding journey, a film indebted to the past that feels brilliantly alive.”
– Esther Zuckerman, IndieWire

 “Shot in gorgeous black-and-white and unfolding like a post-church, pre-supper Sunday afternoon, Brittany Shyne’s debut chronicles the everyday lives of modern Black farmers, working the land and trying to sustain their agrarian livelihood in the 21st century... It’s a work of political activism through sheer lyricism, and exactly the kind of discovery you come to Sundance to see.”
– David Fear, Rolling Stone (“10 Best Movies at Sundance 2025”)

 “HYPNOTICALLY SOULFUL. It is inherently poetic and powerful to see Black folks farming land they own... 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... 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.”
– Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com

 “A LYRICAL, SUNDANCE-PRIZE WINNING DEBUT... 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.”
– Lisa Kennedy, Variety