Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz stress the need for seed in activist documentary
SEED: THE UNTOLD STORY (Taggart Siegel & Jon Betz, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, September 23
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.seedthemovie.com
“We’re fooling with Mother Nature,” Montana organic wheat farmer and U.S. senator Jon Tester says in Seed: The Untold Story, a crunchy activist documentary opening September 23 at Cinema Village. Produced, directed, and edited by Jon Betz and Taggart Siegel, the film focuses on how ninety-four percent of vegetable seed varieties have disappeared over the last hundred years and how farming communities around the world are now trying to save and protect seeds while battling the government and such chemical companies as Monsanto. The facts are staggering; the number of varieties of cabbage has gone from 544 to 28, beets 288 to 17, cauliflower 158 to 9, artichokes 34 to 2, and asparagus 46 to 1. Betz and Siegel, who previously collaborated on Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?, travel from India, Mexico, and Namibia to Hawaii, New Mexico, and Washington, DC, among other places, meeting with Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and organic farmers who talk about the importance of the relationship between people and the land and how seeds, and corn in particular, are an intrinsic part of so many cultures. “Seeds are so crafty. There is a power . . . to me it’s magic. It’s a life force so strong,” anthropologist Jane Goodall says. “Corn ignited the sacred connection we have with seeds,” Mohawk Rowen White of Sierra Seeds explains. Bill McDorman of the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance and Native Seeds/SEARCH compares a seed bank to Fort Knox, Will Bonsall of the Scatterseed Project says that bean and seed collections are like jewelry stores, while environmental lawyer and author Claire Hope Cummings proclaims, “Hybrid corn was the atom bomb of agriculture.” Also discussing the need for biodiversity and respect for nature’s bounty are Hopi Nation leader Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan, Center for Food Safety lawyers Andrew Kimball and George Kimbrell, Winona LaDuke of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, Kauai councilman Gary Hooser, an emotional Emigdio Ballon of Tesuque Pueblo, and Native Hawaiian and teacher Malia Chun, who calls what the chemical companies are doing “a disgrace to our culture.”
“I’ve always been dazzled by diversity,” Will Bonsall of the Scatterseed Project says in SEED
But as bleak as things might look — climate change continues while Monsanto keeps patenting seeds, suing so they don’t have to reveal what pesticides they use in experimental farming, and fighting legislation requiring labeling of genetically modified food products — the battle is far from over. “We will refuse to obey laws that force us to accept GMOs and patents,” says the ever-hopeful and brightly positive physicist, activist, and author Dr. Vandana Shiva, adding, “We need to protect the diversity, integrity, and freedom of life, give seed its own freedom so that we as humans can have our freedom.” The film is beautifully photographed by Siegel, with gorgeous shots of nature in almost every frame, aside from those that feature, um, corny animation. And Betz and Siegel make no bones about their message; this is a film that is meant to stir viewers to action, and it’s hard not to want to do something to get involved after watching it. Betz and Siegel will be at Cinema Village for Q&As following the 5:10 (with Stephen Ritz of Green Bronx Machine), 7:10, and 9:20 screenings on September 23 and 24; other special guests include Alex Beauchamp of Food and Water Watch on September 26 at 7:10, Clara Parks of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank and Heather Liljengren of the Greenbelt Native Plant Center on September 27 at 7:10, and Carol Durst-Wertheim of the New York Women’s Culinary Alliance on September 29 at 7:10.
When we were kids, it was always a treat when our parents packed us in the car and took us to Adventureland, a small amusement park in Farmingdale, Long Island. It wasn’t quite the same treat for writer-director Greg Mottola, who documents one summer he spent working as a carny there in the sweet coming-of-age comedy Adventureland, an underappreciated gem from last decade. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Mottola’s alter ego, James Brennan, a college grad in 1987 who is planning on traveling through Europe before starting grad school at Columbia — until his parents take a serious financial hit, forcing him to spend the summer working at the local amusement park in Pittsburgh called Adventureland. (Mottola had wanted to shoot the film in the actual Long Island location but found that the current state of Adventureland was too upscale compared to the one he remembers, so he found a more suitable cinematic park.) James is a hyperintellectual virgin who is waiting for true love, and he thinks he might have found it in fellow carny Em Lewin (Kristen Stewart). However, he doesn’t know that Em is also a booty call for the older Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the hot maintenance man whose legendary claim to fame is that he once jammed with Lou Reed. Meanwhile, the amusement park’s hot-to-trot Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva) has returned, and she might be considering trying out a nice guy like James instead of her usual tough dudes.
In November 1959, Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) brutally murdered a Kansas family. After reading a small piece about the killings in the New York Times, New Yorker writer Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) sets out with his research assistant, Harper “Nell” Lee (Catherine Keener), to cover the story from a unique angle, which soon becomes the workings of the classic nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. Capote tells police chief Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) right off the bat that he cares only about the story, not what happens to the killers, which does not endear him to the local force. But when the murderers are captured, Capote begins a dangerous relationship with Smith, who comes to think of the writer as a true friend, while Capote gets caught up deeper than he ever thought possible. Based on the exhaustive biography by Gerald Clarke, Capote is a slow-moving character study featuring excellent acting and some interesting surprises, even for those who thought they knew a lot about the party-loving chronicler of high society and high living. Hoffman, who died from a drug overdose in 2014 at the age of forty-six, earned an Oscar for portraying the socialite author, who was played the following year by Toby Jones in Douglas McGrath’s Infamous, which was based on a book by George Plimpton. Capote, which was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Bennett Miller), Best Supporting Actress (Keener), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Dan Futterman), is screening on September 23 in the Museum of the Moving Image series “Philip Seymour Hoffman: The Master,” a sixteen-film tribute to Hoffman, a native New Yorker who left us well before his time. The series continues through October 2 with such Hoffman films as John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (introduced by Shanley), Todd Solondz’s Happiness, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Nominated for the Palme d’Or and a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, My Night at Maud’s, Éric Rohmer’s fourth entry in his Six Moral Tales series (falling between La Collectionneuse and Claire’s Knee) continues the French director’s fascinating exploration of love, marriage, and tangled relationships. Three years removed from playing the romantic racecar driver Jean-Louis in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, Jean-Louis Trintignant again stars as a man named Jean-Louis, this time a single thirty-four-year-old Michelin engineer living a relatively solitary life in the French suburb of Clermont. A devout Catholic, he is developing an obsession with a fellow churchgoer, the blonde, beautiful Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), about whom he knows practically nothing. After bumping into an old school friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), the two men delve into deep discussions of religion, Marxism, Pascal, mathematics, Jansenism, and women. Vidal then invites Jean-Louis to the home of his girlfriend, Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorced single mother with open thoughts about sexuality, responsibility, and morality that intrigue Jean-Louis, for whom respectability and appearance are so important. The conversation turns to such topics as hypocrisy, grace, infidelity, and principles, but Maud eventually tires of such talk. “Dialectic does nothing for me,” she says shortly after explaining that she always sleeps in the nude. Later, when Jean-Louis and Maud are alone, she tells him, “You’re both a shamefaced Christian and a shamefaced Don Juan.” Soon a clearly conflicted Jean-Louis is involved in several love triangles that are far beyond his understanding, so he again seeks solace in church. My Night at Maud’s is a classic French tale, with characters spouting off philosophically while smoking cigarettes, drinking wine and other cocktails, and getting naked. Shot in black-and-white by Néstor Almendros, the film roams from midnight mass to a single woman’s bed and back to church, as Jean-Louis, played with expert concern by Trintignant, is forced to examine his own deep desires and how they relate to his spirituality. Fabian (Belle de Jour, The Letter) is outstanding as Maud, whose freedom titillates and confuses Jean-Louis. My Night at Maud’s, which is being shown September 17-18 and 24-25 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Six Moral Tales series, is one of Rohmer’s best, most accomplished works despite its haughty intellectualism.