Clear-eyed and intimate, Farmsteaders is as much a study of place as it is a study of persistence. Having abandoned a career as a food processing engineer at General Mills, Nick returns home, the prodigal son, and he, his wife Celeste and their young family resurrect his late grandfather’s dairy farm. Heroic, benign and accessible, Nick and Celeste’s meditations on life, legacy, and resistance offer an unexpected voice from a forsaken people – those who grow the food that sustains us.
Short Before the Feature: NourishNC Short // Steven McCrossan :: Feeding Children, Fueling The Future.
Bio
Shaena Mallett is a documentary filmmaker, editor, award-winning photographer, and teacher. She grew up on a family homestead and to this day prefers to be outside.
She graduated from Ohio University where she produced a participatory story project focused on several women and their relationships to land. She worked as an assistant editor on three short documentary films produced by the Maine Farmland Trust and Seedlight Pictures that explore the growing pains of the local food movement. Her stories are often found on backroads, entangled in roots, relationships with land, and what it means to be “home.” Farmsteaders will be her first full-length film.