Director Brittany Shyne’s Oscar Shortlisted Feature Documentary seamlessly weaves together the stories of three Black generational farmers to create a collective and intimate portrait of farming today, SEEDS is a moving and powerful exploration of their lives, joys and struggles as well as the fragility of legacy and owning land. With remarkable intimacy, the film documents their everyday lives - cotton harvesting, chasing cows, dealing with broken machinery and financial precarities. The camera relishes simple moments - conversations through car windows, candy from grandma’s purse as it captures moments of warmth, joy and fulfillment - turning them into striking vignettes that honor the families’ connection to the land and each other. First-time Director Brittany Shyne stops by to talk about her own nine-year journey to bring thus multi-dimensional to us and how their stories have became more prescient with every passing day.

About the filmmaker - Brittany Shyne is an independent filmmaker based in Dayton, Ohio. Working in the narrative and non-fiction artform, her work seeks to depict the complexity of everyday life by examining themes such as personal histories, alienation and cultural modernization. Her films lyrically weave together frameworks of race, class, culture, identity and family lineage. She has worked as a cinematographer on films such as THE DEBUTANTES (Tribeca,’24) and Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar’s academy award-winning film AMERICAN FACTORY. Shyne was the recipient of the 2021 Artist Disruptor Award from the Center of Cultural Power. Her film SEEDS is her first feature documentary. . She is an alumni of the Chicken & (Egg) celerator Lab and was a Firelight Media Documentary Fellow (2020-2022). Shyne received her MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University and a BFA in Motion Pictures from Wright State University.