Farmsteaders – 2018

Monday, April 9, 7:00 PM *Opening Night Film!
Sunday, April 15, 1:30 PM

Farmsteaders
Director: Shaena Mallett
Documentary
63 minutes
USA

Farmsteaders is a love story, a farm story, and a story of contemporary rural America. Nick Nolan, his wife Celeste, and their young family are on a journey to resurrect his grandfather’s dairy farm – fighting to keep this homeland from “drying up and blowing away,” something that has happened to about 4.7 million farms in the U.S. as the pressures of corporate-driven food have left deep scars in the region.

“People don’t really understand the beauty of life if they don’t understand the tragic side of it,” Nick says. “Everything beautiful is created out of pain.” Nick and Celeste’s meditations on life, legacy, and resistance offer an unexpected voice at a time when the country is so deeply divided. With much of the current rift falling along demographic lines, there is a deepening discussion about the rural white American. And yet here they stand in contrast to all of our expectations – heroic, benign, accessible.

Farmsteaders points an honest and tender lens at the beauty and hardship of everyday life, as the Nolans work to balance their fears and hopes with so much at stake. For the Nolans only three things remain certain: family is everything, nothing ever stays the same, and the land holds it all together.

“It’s not just a story about farming, but of standing up to live one’s life in accordance with one’s beliefs, no matter the sacrifice.” – Huffington Post

Playing with:

The Last Honey Hunter
Director: Ben Knight
Documentary
30 minutes
USA

Maule Dhan Rai is the last man in the remote Nepal village of Saadi who’s been visited in a dream by a wrathful forest spirit called Rongkemi. If no one else in the village has the dream, a generations-old tradition may die.