Films with: Brown, Owsley

Look & see a portrait of Wendell Berry /

"In 1965, Wendell Berry returned home to Henry County, where he bought a small farm house and began a life of farming, writing and teaching. This lifelong relationship with the land and community would come to form the core of his prolific writings. A half century later Henry County, like many rural communities across America, has become a place of quiet ideological struggle. In the span of a generation, the agrarian virtues of simplicity, land stewardship, sustainable farming, local economies and rootedness to place have been replaced by a capital-intensive model of industrial agriculture characterized by machine labor, chemical fertilizers, soil erosion and debt--all of which have frayed the fabric of rural communities. Writing from a long wooden desk beneath a forty-paned window, Berry has watched this struggle unfold, becoming one of its most passionate and eloquent voices in defense of agrarian life. Filmed across four seasons in the farming cycle, Look & see blends observational scenes of farming life, interviews with farmers and community members with evocative, carefully framed shots of the surrounding landscape. Thus, in the spirit of Berry's agrarian philosophy, Henry County itself will emerge as a character in the film--a place and a landscape that is deeply interdependent with the people that inhabit it"--Two Birds Film WWW site

DVD 13480

Music makes a city

In the late 1940s, an orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky was about to go out of business. At that point, a new mayor stepped into office whose views about civic vitality were founded on the ideas of the Chinese sage Confucius. His vision of prosperity was focused on making the arts available to every citizen of the city. Music Makes a City tells the rousing, inspiring, nearly unbelievable story of an American city and its orchestra.

DVD 11493