A visual love letter to the Black, rural South, director-cinematographer Brittany Shyne’s “Seeds” captures a rare snapshot of Black America, where land ownership is a birthright and legacy. Shyne allows her subjects to serve as their own storytellers, focusing on the people of the Kentavia-Williams clan of Thomasville, Georgia, who own what’s known as a “Centennial farm,” and Willie Head Jr. and his family in nearby Pavo. She gives space to the plurality of Black stories, keeping family, land, community, and history at their center.
Following rules closer to a Black literary tradition than a visual one, Shyne avoids the common approach of many “Black” documentaries more consumed with the problem than the people the problem effects. When she opens the film by going on a family car ride to a funeral, with the camera acknowledging the vast swaths of land along the way, Shyne introduces people, not victims, who live and die while always holding family and community close.
The film, which premiered on Saturday in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, lets simple scenes play out. An elderly woman talks with her young granddaughter, who asks her about heaven as they leave a funeral; Willie Head hangs out with his great-granddaughter and shows off her resemblance to his mother; Carlie Williams sits on a porch at the grand age of 89; young mothers hold babies — these and other more mundane, everyday moments are what real living is. The moments show what’s most important and why, and they make it clear why these people fight so hard to hold on when their way of living is threatened.
Like RaMell Ross and his Oscar-nominated documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” Shyne lets the camera bear witness. Because she began this process a decade ago, embedding herself within these families and this community, the familiarity and intimacy that exudes from her portraits is authentic. By taking her time and shooting only in black and white, Shyne creates a sacred space where these families can be themselves with dignity and pride. She captures their gentleness and rightfully projects it as strength.
As beautiful as it is, “Seeds” also plays as a eulogy documenting the decline of generational farming in the Black South, and the way racial discrimination continues to undermine Black success. There was a time in the early 20th century, “Seeds” points out, when Black people owned over 16 million acres of land. Today it’s far less and the future doesn’t look bright.
Shyne lets her camera linger on the actual planting and tilling of the land, but that work is done by the older generations, by Carlie Williams and Willie Head, there are no 18-year-olds, like Williams once was, choosing to become farmers in these communities. In Washington, D.C., when Head and other weathered Black farmers protest their plight, you won’t find any young warriors in the vein of the young Ralph Angel depicted in Ava DuVernay’s groundbreaking narrative OWN series “Queen Sugar.”
And what’s the incentive? The $2 billion settlement promised to Black farmers from the U.S. government is still undispensed, even as white farmers, notes Head, are getting more than their fair share. Banks and the Federal Housing Administration routinely deny Black farmers, he adds, ensuring that they can’t make a living off the land.
To illustrate the ever-expanding disparities, Shyne includes a scene of younger Black men harvesting cotton with heavy machinery they aren’t likely to be able to afford. Her focus on the fluffy white balls as the monstrous machine gobbles them up alludes to cotton’s weighted history, which reaches from the days of slavery and Jim Crow into the present. In a subsequent scene, Head argues with the associate director of the Department of Agriculture in a conference call, calling out President Biden over undistributed funds.
“Seeds,” with its patient pacing and its running time of two hours, is unlikely to find a large audience. Commercial success, however, is not Shyne’s goal. Instead, she’s leaving a legacy of her own by documenting these stories.
