In her directorial debut Seeds, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary, Brittany Shyne offers an intimate look at the fate of Black farmers in the American South. Shooting in black-and-white with a single-minded focus on her subjects, Shyne creates what feels like an elegy for a way of living on the brink of dying out.

Seeds sets its tone immediately in the opening scene, as family members gather for a funeral and a preacher intones “Earth to Earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The twin subjects of the documentary—the land and its generations of tenants—are introduced in the monochrome shots with almost heavenly lighting. As an elderly woman and her grandniece rest their heads against each other in the backseat of a car en route to the burial, giant cotton picker machines make their way through fields in the surrounding countryside.

There’s a deliberately slow pace to the documentary, which doesn’t rely on interviews, archival footage, or narration to tell its story. Rather, Shyne creates a dreamlike atmosphere with long shots of the farmers’ work and scenes where her subjects speak unprompted, inviting the audience into the conversation. Seeds loosely follows two men: the octogenarian Carlie Williams, a farmer who’s worked from the age of 18 on the land belonging to his family since 1883, and Willie Head Jr., who farms 72 acres alone with the hope of his family joining him on the land someday.

It’s a testament both to Shyne’s level of access and the skillful editing (done by Malika Zouhali-Worrall) that the narrative of Seeds unfolds even without a concrete storyline. The camera focuses on Carlie and Willie at work— harvesting pecans and mustard greens and turnips, chasing cattle away from a broken fence—and at home. There are scenes of real beauty that happen quietly in front of the camera: Carlie massaging the atrophied hands of his disabled daughter; Willie holding his great-grandbaby up to the window during a storm, singing a lullaby. Shyne looks right at the deep crags in their faces and their work-worn hands, lovingly showing the wear and tear on their bodies from years tilling the land. The camera lingers on them in a way that lulls you into their lives, and her subjects seem comfortable and without affect in front of the camera, evidence of the rapport Shyne must have built with them over her years making the film.

Both farmers are committed to carrying on the long history of Black American farmers, but the documentary gradually reveals the precarity of continuing that legacy. Carlie is old, a fact emphasized by a trip to the optometrist after cataract surgery, but still working the land. And Willie’s children have moved away with seemingly no interest in joining their father in his work. There’s no money, either. Willie drives a broken-down truck, fixed up with literal cardboard and string, that he doesn’t have time to fix. (But he does find a minute to leave fresh produce with a neighbor who recently had a stroke. “Pay me another time,” he tells her.)

In naturally occurring conversations, we learn more about the lack of funding threatening their work. Willie runs into a pastor he knows while running errands and tells him about his activism to encourage the release of federal funding to Black farmers like himself. “They takin’ our land,” he says, rattling off the top of his head the statistic that in 1910, Black farmers had 16 million acres of land across the country; today, 1.5 million. Later, on the phone with a government aide who tells Willie the president “remains deeply committed” to their cause,” Willie shares that he’s resorted to funding his farming with his social security check.

These conversations provide the background for the documentary that otherwise would be told via talking-head interviews or direct exposition. And while at times Seeds might benefit from a more rigorous structure, its sparseness does lend itself to total immersion. This is furthered by Shyne’s cinematography, which paints the landscapes of rural Georgia in chiaroscuro and shows the artistry of farming, the simple beauty in the act of picking greens and rinsing them and packing them into trucks. Even her shots out of a tiny van window look striking, like an old Americana painting.

The score and sound design also add necessary weight. Sound designers Daniel Timmons and Ben Kruse isolate and emphasize the noise of farming machinery and the surrounding nature, creating a symphony out of the wind rushing, the corn husks rasping and the cattle lowing. Scattered throughout the documentary, too, is a haunting score from composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, with a choir of voices rising and falling in the background.

Seeds builds gently to its conclusion and lets the audience find its throughlines without an overtly guiding hand. The result is almost mournful; Shyne seems to be memorializing something before it’s gone. At the end, Willie, still fighting to keep the land, does get his dream of his children and grandchildren living in a house he built for them on the farm. Carlie has passed on, leaving his widow, who asks Shyne: “You miss him? You and him’d be riding around town.” Shyne is close enough to be included in their story, and through her lens we are, too.

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Sundance ‘25: Seeds