In light of a greater push internationally toward farm-to-table, organic eating, there’s still a disconnect between the food that we eat and the process by which it comes into our stores and homes. While the upcoming documentary “Peter And The Farm” offers plenty of beautiful backdrops, it also takes an unflinching look at farm life through the eyes of one particularly rugged eccentric.
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Directed by Tony Stone, the film focuses on Peter Dunning, an elderly farmer who still pretty much does it all on his farm, even if his ability to do so is starting to wane. Throughout the doc, he guides viewers across his land, sharing the memories and stories he’s built up across a lifetime. Here’s the official synopsis:
Peter Dunning is a rugged individualist in the extreme, a hard-drinking loner and former artist who has burned bridges with his wives and children and whose only company, even on harsh winter nights, are the sheep, cows, and pigs he tends on his Vermont farm. Peter is also one of the most complicated, sympathetic documentary subjects to come along in some time, a product of the 1960s counterculture whose poetic idealism has since soured. For all his candor, he slips into drunken self-destructive habits, cursing the splendors of a pastoral landscape that he has spent decades nurturing. Imbued with an aching tenderness, Tony Stone’s documentary is both haunting and heartbreaking, a mosaic of its singular subject’s transitory memories and reflections—however funny, tragic, or angry they may be.
“Peter And The Farm” hits iTunes and OnDemand, and opens in theaters November 4th.