Country: USA
Year: 2025
Duration: 123'
Interweaving the stories of three Black generational farmers to create a collective and intimate portrait of farming today, a moving and powerful exploration of their lives, joys and struggles as well as the fragility of legacy and owning land. With remarkable intimacy, the film documents their everyday lives - cotton harvesting, chasing cows, dealing with broken machinery and financial precarities. The camera relishes simple moments - conversations through car windows, candy from grandma’s purse as it captures moments of warmth, joy and fulfillment - turning them into striking vignettes that honor the families’ connection to the land and each other.
Biography
film director
Brittany Shyne
(Dayton, Ohio, Usa) is an independent filmmaker. By utilizing observational techniques and poetic language, her films lyrically weave together frameworks of race, class, culture and family lineage. Her debut feature, Seeds, recently premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it received the esteemed U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Award. She also works as a cinematographer on films such as The Debutantes (Tribeca, ’24), This Time, This Place (Tribeca, ’21), and Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar’s Academy Award-winning film American Factory (Sundance ’19). She is an alumna of the Chicken & (Egg)celerator Lab and was a Firelight Media Documentary Fellow (2020–2022). Shyne received her MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University and a BFA in Motion Pictures from Wright State University.
FILMOGRAFIA
Painted Lady (doc, cm, 2013), Seeds (doc, 2025).
Declaration
film director
“I decided to create Seeds in black and white with the hopes of creating a film that can exist beyond the confounds of time or a specific moment in history. I’m very inspired by black portraiture photography, and particularly the 20th century photographer, P.H. Polk, who made elegant and dignified, posed portraits of everyday African-Americans. Polk depicted his subjects in a way that gave them ownership and authority over their images, meticulously crafting light out of darkness, resulting in vivid images of added depth and texture. Like Polk, I've approached the cinematography as affirmations of self-identity.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR, CINEMATOGRAPHY: Brittany Shyne. FILM EDITING: Malika Zouhali-Worrall. MUSIC: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. SOUND: Brittany Shyne, Rodrigo Salvatierra. PRODUCTION: Danielle Varga, Sabrina Schmidt Gordon, Brittany Shyne per Walking Productions.
CONTACT: Indox Films luke@indoxfilms.com
