Critic Reviews

Seeds is not a journalistic investigation but a poetic contemplation.

Seeds is, at the abundant heart of it all, a work of protest art and political activism through sheer poetry. Attention must be paid.

It’s an incredibly rewarding journey, a film indebted to the past that feels brilliantly alive.

Seeds may be indebted to the elder subjects that Shyne centralizes, but it’s also a film that dares to look forward, suggesting that — despite everything — these farms will continue.

Seeds is a sweet, meditative elegy for a way of life that is fast disappearing.

Although there are urgent economic and political challenges facing these families, this isn’t muckraking cinema. Instead, the filmmaker hews to the quotidian, the weekly, the annual. Shot in black and white, this portrait of a people is affecting and achy.

Shyne is less concerned with a unified story, instead dipping in and out of her subject’s lives and in the process giving us a much more involved experience of a fading subculture.

Though Seeds is a lyrical portrait of a way of life, it also harbors an urgency that’s very much of our moment.

These moments have a tactile intimacy that’s incredibly powerful, placing these ordinary people in an almost timeless continuum of seemingly ordinary behavior that becomes extraordinary in memory, or through the eyes of a camera.

Seeds is a film that lives and breathes as we absorb the wisdom of these elders.