Seed: An Untold Story

Industrial agriculture has fundamentally changed society. Throughout the 20th century, small-scale farmers gave way to large monoculture operations, and in turn, the United States went from a nation of farmers to a nation of city dwellers. Yet the effects of this industrialization go far beyond society, and into the very DNA of the world around us.

Seed: An Untold Story highlights how these changes in agriculture are disrupting livelihoods, and fundamentally altering nature as well as our relation to it.

The film’s premise hinges on the fact that in the past century, 94 percent of seed varieties cultivated and developed by humanity over the course of 12,000 years have disappeared. Seed is unapologetically anti-GMO and focuses heavily on the frequent corporate boogeyman, Monsanto.

To give insight and commentary, the documentary features author and anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva, primatologist Jane Goodall and economist Raj Patel, among many others.

The documentary, by Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz, brings viewers around the world to tell the stories of a community in Hawaii dealing with health effects of Dow Chemical test fields, the epidemic of farmers in rural India committing suicide and people in the birthplace of corn – Oaxaca, Mexico – struggling to maintain their dozens of heirloom varieties.

Visually, Seed succeeds with animation, collage, stop-action claymation and macro time-lapse techniques. These scenes give the doc an eclectic aesthetic in the face of what could have been a visually static slog full of slow pastoral landscapes and talking heads.

Unfortunately, calling the documentary an untold story is not entirely accurate. The loss of genetic diversity in agriculture is a story that has been told many times. This is also a story about the loss of business diversity and globalized consolidation in the food supply, where 10 companies now control two-thirds of the global seed market.

The narrative also seems to suffer from ADHD. It jumps around from location to location, from talking head to talking head. It’s as if the directors didn’t want to leave a single scene on the cutting room floor, yet they did not have the space to give each character enough time to justify their reason for being included.

Seed also finds itself in the same trap many progressively minded documentaries fall into: It presents anecdotes and facts its targeted audience already believes to be true. It also doesn’t pose any solutions, and it doesn’t even mention how to feed the global population, which is projected to hit 9.7 billion by 2050.

Yet for all of its shortcomings, the story of seeds is a story that needs to be told again and again. The ill effects of farm chemicals have been documented right here in Monterey County. And elsewhere, the spread of GMOs moves beyond markets, through the very pollen in the air, crossing and mixing with heirloom varieties of crops that were slowly modified with the passage of centuries.

SEED: AN UNTOLD STORY (2 1/2) Directed by Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz • Starring Vandana Shiva, Jane Goodall, Raj Patel • Not Rated • 90 min. • At Osio Theater