Brittany Shyne attends the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Seeds” at The Ray Theatre on January 25, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Robin Marshall/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Lucy Spicer
Brittany Shyne’s Seeds starts with a funeral.
But even as the individuals onscreen shuffle out of the wake and into their cars, we’re reminded that life begins anew — from inside a car, we see an elderly woman slowly fishing candy out of her purse for her energetic grandchild.
Premiering in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition, Shyne’s feature directorial debut recognizes that some films don’t benefit from a linear format. “I knew my film was always very cyclical,” says Shyne at Seeds’ post-premiere Q&A on January 25 at The Ray Theatre in Park City, Utah. “I knew that this community was on the fringes, and all these people were at a certain point in age. And I think it just makes sense to go back in time with these participants.” The community that Shyne — who also acted as the documentary’s cinematographer — chose to center for this project comprises Black generational farmers in the American South. In 1910, Black farmers owned 16 million acres in the U.S., but today that number is much smaller. The farmers Shyne followed are still determined to pass their legacy on to younger generations. “I just thought it was important to understand things wither away, but things grow again,” explains Shyne.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, Seeds invites us to observe three farms — two in Georgia and one in Mississippi — in a project that was nine years in the making. For editor Malika Zouhali-Worrall, the abundance of footage that Shyne collected was a boon. “From an editing point of view, it was like a godsend. There were 200 days of footage,” Zouhali-Worrall tells the audience during the film’s Q&A.
“For a while we were trying to figure out how important it was to know which specific farm you were on, because you can get really bogged down in those details. And there was a wonderful, liberating moment when we realized it’s like a kind of tapestry of farms in the South,” reveals Zouhali-Worrall, adding that the spiritual and sacred truth of the land came through the intimate moments captured by Shyne, even without providing details. “Whatever is happening in the moment just happens through Brittany’s beautiful cinematography.”
One of Shyne’s boldest cinematography choices was to make the film in black and white. “I think the first time I went to Georgia, I didn’t actually know I was gonna do black and white,” says Shyne. “But I felt like there was something super special about this place, super archaic and arcane.” She continues, “I really wanted to lean into this idea of this place. A lot of these farmers are elderly, so I wanted to just kind of suspend time, the passage of time. A lot of these foundational pillars are in a different chapter of their life where things are slowing down, so I think that’s why I chose to do black and white. And I also was just really interested in portraiture, as well.”
Shyne’s interest in portraiture results in gorgeous close-ups of weathered faces and tender scenes of a farmer envisioning his family’s legacy while holding his great-granddaughter. These farmers know that they’re facing obstacles to the future they want — for the land and for their descendants. In one scene, we witness a group of Black farmers coming together to protest the fact that white farmers are receiving government funds before Black farmers are. Even as they fight the systems working against them, we see them passing on their knowledge and resilience to the next generation. When asked during the Q&A whether she knows if the farmers’ grandchildren, nieces, and nephews appeared interested in preserving this way of life, Shyne reassures the audience: “They are very intent on continuing the legacy.”
