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.
“Shyne takes her time. You have to orient yourself to the slow rhythms of the piece, which encourage you to relish in these quiet moments. But it’s an incredibly rewarding journey, a film indebted to the past that feels brilliantly alive.” —Esther Zuckerman, IndieWire “The rich black-and-white cinematography adds gravitas to an already important battle. At the same time, Shyne’s observant eye dutifully captures the unique daily rituals and rhythms that mark her subjects’ tangible lives. Shyne’s deep-rooted vision is the kind that grips you, eternally.” —Robert Daniels, rogerebert.com “SEEDS is, at the abundant heart of it all, a work of protest art and political activism through sheer poetry. Attention must be paid.” —David Fear, Rolling Stone “The film is shot in black and white, and its images feel so ageless that you could imagine [Brittany Shyneshe had] somehow gotten hold of a time machine and slipped back decades…. The approach SEEDS takes, however, isn’t journalistic. It’s something more like a softly sung ballad, handed down from generation to generation.” —Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times
