Seeds – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

TRUE/FALSE Film Festival 2025 Overview – Diane Carson reports

March 3, 2025March 9, 2025 Diane Carson documentaries, Land with No Rider, Middletown, Requiem for a Tribe, Seeds, The Wolves Always Come at Night, True/False Film Festival 2025

Begun in 2004, the 2025 True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri, offered its always impressive international selection of documentaries championing (per the T/F mission) “the challenge of interpreting reality on screen with playfulness, sensitivity, discipline, and daring imagination.” This year’s 30 new features and 24 shorts represented an educational, inspirational, and entertaining treasure trove of international films anchored in historical and personal experiences. A bonus of the True/False Festival is the attendance of directors and/or producers and sometimes subjects, with post-screening Q&As that add background information and update the films’ content. Exploration of the past emerged as a significant theme, perhaps unsurprisingly given the world’s varied crises. Throughout analytical, extraordinary stories, directors consistently emphasized the critical importance of informing the present by incorporating lessons and insights from previously challenging as well as uplifting events.

Festivals Reviews

SEEDS (Sundance FF 2025) – Review by Leslie Combemale

February 3, 2025February 2, 2025 Leslie Combemale (Sundance FF 2025), Brittany Shyne, cinema verité, Grand Jury Prize, Seeds, southern Black farmers

Documentarian Brittany Shyne chronicles the experiences of several southern Black farming families, from their work in the fields and harvests, to their family and community gatherings and their entreaties to local and national representatives for financial help equal to that being given to the White farmers next door. All this is done with great patience and care, and without, it certainly seems, any interruptions or much subjectivity on her part. Moments unfold as they will, as audiences watch often older farmers speak in their own time, unhurried, about whatever’s on their minds. That might be worry, or joy about a new child in the family, or what animal or field needs tending they don’t have enough hours in the day or equipment to get to. Funerals, car rides, eye exams, cow feeding time, all get equal attention, and are shown in every permutation of what black and white filming can do in partnership with good Southern exposure.

Festivals Reviews

SEEDS (TIFF 2024) – Review by Rachel West

September 16, 2024September 15, 2024 Rachel West Dallas Goldtooth, Graham Greene, Kaniehtiio Horn, Kanienʼkehá:ka, mohawk, Seeds, TIFF 2024

Kaniehtiio Horn’s Seeds is at once refreshing and comforting as it blends new Indigenous perspectives into a familiar genre. Ziggy (Horn) is smart, confident, and a champion of her community and culture. Horn rises to the challenge in her first leading role, showcasing her humour and thoughtfulness in her performance. With calculated violence, Ziggy is not afraid to defend what is important to her as she uses her heritage, wit, and physical strength to defend her community. Horn’s talent is unmissable. If Seeds of any indication what she has to offer audiences, she will continue to be one to watch both in front of and behind the camera.