January 9, 2026
by Carla Hay
Directed by Brittany Shyne
Culture Representation: Taking place in 2023, in Thomas County, Georgia, and briefly in Washington, D.C., the documentary film “Seeds” features a predominantly African American group of people (with some white people) who are connected in some way to multiple-generational, working-class farming communities.
Culture Clash: Black farmers struggle to keep their businesses afloat as they experience discrimination in government funding, property ownership and allocation of resources.
Culture Audience: “Seeds” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching documentaries that take an up-close-and-personal look at African American farmers, who are rarely shown in movies and TV shows.
“Seeds” is a cinéma vérité-styled documentary that intimately looks at the plight of African American farmers in an industry where racism, loss of land, and decreasing resources affect their livelihoods. Family life remains a unifying foundation. The movie is stylishly filmed in black and white, which gives it a timeless look.
Directed by Brittany Shyne (who is also the movie’s cinematographer and one of its producers), “Seeds” had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize. “Seeds” made the rounds at several other film festivals in 2025, including the Woodstock Film Festival, AFI Fest and DOC NYC. “Seeds” was also on the shortlist for Best Documentary Feature Film for the 2026 Academy Awards. “Seeds” was filmed in 2023, in Thomas County, Georgia.
“Seeds” might leave some viewers bored or frustrated because the movie unfolds like a patchwork quilt, with scenes stitched together that don’t necessarily match one after the other. The people on screen are not identified by their names when they are on screen. Their names are only listed in the end credits.
No one in interviewed. When the people who are being filmed in the documentary talk, it’s without interference from any of the documentary’s filmmakers. If you can tolerate this type of “raw footage” storytelling in documentaries, then you will be able to let “Seeds” take you on a “fly on the wall” journey through the lives of the farmers who are featured in the documentary.
The two farmers who get most of the screen time are Willie Head Jr. and Carlie Williams, who are both elderly. At the time this documentary was filmed, Head was still an active farmer, while Williams looks like he’s nearly retired. Head is much more vocal than Williams about the racist injustices that he says African American farmers experience.
Head comes from a large family and worries about what will happen to his farm if none of his descendants can take over the business. Head is the guardian for his great-granddaughter, an adorable and playful child, whom he has nicknamed Jessie Mae because she resembles his deceased mother, who was also named Jessie Mae. To prove his point, he holds up a picture of his mother next to his great-granddaughter (who was about 5 or 6 years old when filmed for this documentary) to show how much they look alike.
“She reminds me of my mother every day,” Head says of his great-granddaughter. “This is the love of my life.” Head (who says he has five sisters and a brother) goes on to explain that he took care of his mother for 12 years after this father died. He adds that his hopes and dreams for his great-granddaughter is that she will go to college, get married, and have kids.
The cameras follow Head as he shows how he keeps seeds in his freezer and how he still uses the 2021 Grier’s Almanac as a handy guide. (Grier’s Almanac went out of business in 2021.) Head also talks about the dwindling number of acres that black farmers have in the United States. In another scene, Head has a frustrated phone conversation with an unidentified man from an unidentified government agency. In the conversation, Head complains that black farmers get less funding compared to white farmers.
Later in the documentary, Head and some other farmers attend an activist event in Washington, D.C., on March 1, 2023. Black farmers and allies had protests in near the White House and the headquarters for the United States Department of Agriculture to advocate for racial justice and equal rights in debt relief. Many of the protestors were claimants entitled to a settlement in the landmark Pigford v. Glickman class-action lawsuits claiming systemic racism against black farmers in America.
Three of the farmers have a heated phone conversation in a car with an unnamed government agent who has told them to wait nine more months for the funding that is owed to them. One of the farmers says angrily: “Ask Joe Biden to sign an executive order. Pay the farmers, and you can argue about it later in court. He can do that. He’s sending money over to Ukraine every day. When he came to South Carolina and asks for our vote [in 2020], we didn’t put him off for nine months. And we don’t want him putting us off!”
Not all of these scenes in the movie are about tension and strife. The documentary has scenes of family gatherings where people are in good spirits. In one of these party scenes, local men play jazz in a garage as partygoers dance nearby. Party attendees are also shown enjoying a family-styled cookout.
Is any farming actually shown in “Seeds”? Yes, but it’s not the focus of the movie. There’s a scene of watermelon harvesting, for example. But “Seeds” is mostly about showing the farmers are like as people in their personal lives instead of showing their work routines. The documentary’s first scene actually shows a funeral in the farming community.
But sometimes, the everyday things that the farmers and their relatives are shown doing in their personal lives can get to be too mundane. Do we really need to see Williams at an eye exam and talking to the administrative assistant who is processing his payment for the exam? Do you really needs to see several minutes of an unidentified elderly woman combing her hair in her bedroom?
Williams isn’t as quotable as Head, mostly because he tends to mumble and ramble. The documentary would’ve been better-served to have more age diversity in the farmers who are featured. Some younger people (such as Head’s son) are in the documentary, but only for brief moments. “Seeds” (which has a spellbinding ambient musical score by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe) is a meditative portrait instead a hard-hitting investigation. Interest in the movie requires patience and an open mind for a cinematic experience that doesn’t follow a stereotypical formula for the documentary’s subject matter.
Interior Films had limited-engagement screenings for “Seeds” in the U.S. in 2025. The movie will be released in New York City on January 16, 2026, and in Los Angeles on January 23, 2026.