‘Seeds’ Trailer: In Brittany Shyne’s Oscar-Shortlisted Documentary, Black Farmers Tend Land Held In Their Families For Generations

EXCLUSIVE: Fresh from triumph at the Cinema Eye Honors, the Oscar-shortlisted documentary Seeds has released its first trailer. Watch it above.

Brittany Shyne’s film opens next Friday, January 16, at Film Forum in New York. On Thursday night, it won two Cinema Eye Honors, including Outstanding Debut and Outstanding Cinematography. The film, winner of the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, offers a poetic examination of African American farmers in the South who cultivate land held in their families for generations.

“Seeds was a 9-year journey poignantly demanding and uncompromising in its challenges and yet profoundly enriching,” Shyne said as she accepted the Outstanding Debut award at the Cinema Eye Honors. “I possessed this earnest desire to make this film in order to better understand my ancestral history, those who worked, cultivated, and tended to the land, like my great-grandfather, Benny Gibson, who owned 300 acres in Homer, Louisiana. I wanted to better understand those experiences of what it meant to be richly tethered to a place. Through the lives of the Williams family, William Head Jr., and Ben Burkett, I came to understand what it truly means to sustain a generational legacy and the immeasurable unyielding love they hold for their community and their home.”

In addition to prizes at Sundance and the Cinema Eye Honors, Shyne won Best Director at the IDA Documentary Awards in December and also earned the IDA’s Emerging Filmmaker Award. The documentary has won awards at numerous festivals including Provincetown, San Francisco, Seattle, Montclair, RiverRun in North Carolina, and El Gouna in Egypt. Shyne is nominated for the Truer Than Fiction Award at next month’s Film Independent Spirit Awards.

“As both director and cinematographer, debut filmmaker Brittany Shyne immerses the viewer in the absorbing rhythms and intimate materiality of African-American farm life in Georgia,” Film Forum writes on its website. “Shyne’s patient, poetic eye and ear attune to one farmer’s tender attention to his great granddaughter, alongside the sights and sounds of a community’s honest day’s work—repurposing spent corn cobs for feed, shelling pecans for market, the profound rumble of a massive cotton harvester. As the story of dwindling government support for Black farmers unfolds, exquisite black-and-white imagery lovingly captures the rough-worn hands, faces, and tools-of-trade of octogenarian patriarchs fighting to preserve their family legacies and century-old homesteads.”

Watch the trailer for Seeds above.