Owing to its thoroughly colonial, half-millennium history, land ownership in the United States is bound up with an exceptional density of meanings and power struggles. Seeds takes its viewers on a journey that celebrates the poetry of existence, to the still-contested battlegrounds of the southern United States, where black family farms have taken deep root. Seeds won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and was one of last year’s festival breakouts.

The film’s lingering and stunning black-and-white imagery feels timeless. Rural life at times resembles reflections of the past—images of an America that has never truly existed. In this revisionist pastoral utopia conjured by a spacious, attentive mode of storytelling, black people own the land and white people do not exist at all.

Reality, however, intrudes upon this blissful and immanent way of life when farming alone no longer suffices to put bread on the table. The Department of Agriculture distributes subsidies on racist grounds, with support systematically flowing into the coffers of white farmers. “The Department of Agriculture—the last plantation,” declares a historically conscious protester’s placard.

Quietly, Seeds sows something that reaches beyond the racial oppression permeating U.S. history and the brutal logic of neoliberal competition: sheltered by agricultural machinery and by nature itself, it is possible to live a transgenerational and trans-species coexistence, sustained by the harmonious principles of love and care.

Pöly Julkunen (translated by Herman Tikkanen)