Jill's movie posts

I watched the documentary Broken Limbs, about a man's father's apple growing business in Washington state. The movie shows different farmers in the same area who have to had sell off their land as larger corporations and imported crops have driven down the price of apples so far they can no longer afford to be in business. About midway through the movie, the topic shifts to the "new American farmer", which is going to be the farmer who innovates to keep going, who calls himself sustainable and sells to co-ops and CSAs. These are the two visions of the new American farmer, both of which seem to require a small farm. I would have liked to have seen more about what exactly happened with the apple farmers in that area, more specific details. We see farmers protesting NAFTA and talking about the bank repossessing their land but we don't get an idea of how this happened. It seems the solution offered to this problem is for consumers to buy from local growers. Yet this leaves the middle sized farms, like his father's, out of the game. That is the problem I hear about within agriculture today - giant corporate farms are doing well, the small family farm is getting by because of the buy local trend, but the middle sized farm (which used to make up the majority of agriculture) is going extinct. It seems unlikely that small family farms will ever fulfill all of our food needs again, so basically the majority of us are eating food produced and distributed by a handful of companies. I would have liked to see this film offer more solutions for the middle sized farm - though it did not claim to have all the answers, it seemed like it was advocating for sustainable, small family farms as a solution and did not expose any of the problems in this model or talk about ways for the middle sized farm to compete with large corporate farms, rather than completely change their market.

Agnes Varda's Gleaners and I is a film that has been recommended to me for a while now and I finally got around to watching it. It is really interesting to see this completely sensible act of gleaning that seems to have a rich culture in France, but here at least now it is an act that I would imagine could get a person shot. I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to go on a farm and collect the leftover produce after the harvest. It seemed like maybe it was somewhat illegal there too but people still do it and growers still allow it. Varda looked at other methods of gleaning too - in the U.S. it's known as dumpster diving. These are the contemporary gleaners, or urban gleaners one could say. The style of the film is unlike anything I have seen before. It is mostly a documentary about gleaning (with interviews, shots of people gleaning, different aspects of gleaning, etc.) but also a sort of personal diary. It's interesting because these parts seem to come out of nowhere - you feel like you are watching a typical documentary, learning about gleaning and then suddenly Varda is talking about her aging hands. It's a unique approach to filmmaking in my eyes but I am still not sure what to do with it. I don't have the criteria on which to judge this film because it seems to skip genres and I don't know what it's "supposed" to be. I appreciate that about it.