Cowtown
The oldest weekly professional rodeo in the United States is a place called Cowtown, located in the unexpected eastern state of New Jersey. Here, third-generation proprietor Howard “Grant” Harris, a former bull rider and lifelong cowboy, strives to keep his birthright intact, running horses, producing a weekly show and fending off exorbitant offers to purchase and develop his prime land. He could cash out, but in his mind he’s already got all the treasures he needs. “What we do is what we are,” he says. “We don’t know how to do anything else.”
Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
Writer, poet and thinker Wendell Berry could have spent his life teaching at college campuses, working in offices, living in cities, chasing work opportunities around the country. Instead, he returned home to Henry County, Kentucky, where he bought a piece of land and began a rooted and deliberate life of farming, raising a family, writing and teaching. This lifelong relationship with the land and community would form the foundation of his prolific writings. It also forms the core of this thoughtful film, using Berry’s biography as a springboard to examine the drastic changes that have swept agriculture in the United States. What was once a lifestyle rife with agrarian values of simplicity, stewardship and rootedness transitioned before Berry’s eyes into a capital-intensive model of industrial agriculture, machine labor, soil erosion and debt. In this way, Look & See becomes a greater story of, to use Berry’s famous title, “the unsettling of America.”