2018 Directed by John Chester
The successes and failures of a couple determined to live in harmony with nature on a farm outside of Los Angeles are lovingly chronicled by filmmaking farmer John Chester, in this inspiring documentary.
最大的小小农场, Tout est possible, Unsere grosse kleine Farm, La fattoria dei nostri sogni, Nasze miejsce na ziemi, Самая большая маленькая ферма, 我家有個開心農場
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"You're a good boy Todd" - John Chester (thanks but this is still a weak film)
- 2019 Ranked: boxd.it/2lsbC
A film with the inspiring message that any damn couple (just based on what to doc showed me) in America can do whatever they want with no experience because eventually a person will give them a lot of money to do it.
John and Molly Chester were simple apartment tomato farmers until they decided they wanted to start a farm in California that grew everything. With no experience they write a business plan and they get given tons of money because that's what life is like for white people in America. They hire an expert to help them and they…
"Intent alone is not a protector."
Monday night, I saw an inspiring documentary that my friends had raved about. It's about John Chester and Molly Chester who start Apricot Lane Farms with the help of investors and a goal to live in harmony with nature. It takes place over a period of about 10 years. They go through changes, many deaths, and they also welcome their first son, Beauden.
There are fluffy dogs, a small tiny bunny, pigs being birthed, and much more cuteness. They depend on the ecosystem to make everything work together. However, John Chester talked about when his idealism was compromised when he had to shoot a coyote. It's hard to blame him when hundreds of chickens…
I needed this film, and I suspect many of you need it too. With the never-ceasing battery of bad daily news, it's refreshing to go back to the earth's life cycles and remember what makes it all worthwhile.
I grew up amongst co-op farming hippies so none of this was really new information for me, but it made me both nostalgic for my childhood (milking goats when I was 8) and hopeful for the future. Plus, it is truly beautiful to watch on the big screen or probably any screen. Get out and see it and heck, plant something too.
When documentarian John Chester and his wife Molly bought an abandoned, 200-acre farm in California with the intention of working and harvesting the land as part of a natural ecosystem, Chester also kept a video diary of sorts of their efforts. You can feel the ungainly attempts to force that material into tidy little narratives—the symbolic weight put on the couple’s dog, Todd; the illness of Emma the pig; the threatening wildfire the movie opens with and then doesn’t return to until the anti-climactic ending—but there’s no denying that the images Chester captures, from close-ups of invasive snails to drone shots capturing the geometric patterns of their land, are stunning. And their story raises compelling questions: how big can a…
A feature-length Chipotle commercial. People literally started clapping when they found out ducks eat snails.
There is a trickery to documentaries involving animals that really makes me sick. It's impossible to see a cute animal and not coo and awww at the screen. The problem is, 9/10 times, this trick is used to cover up the fact that the documentary itself has multiple faults. Sometimes it's that the subject itself is problematic, other times the narrative device is manipulative, and often the pure filmmaking is just cheap.
The Biggest Little Farm suffers from all of these problems and more.
The narrative of this film is rather blank. Sure, on paper the journey of someone starting a farm is an arc, but it's so weak, and the actual story of those struggles are never felt. The…
There are some striking images in these hagiographic home movies of a couple's pursuit of creating a new Garden of Eden. I guess that's what happens when a cameraperson is the director/subject/narrator. But despite (or perhaps because of) the idealistic vision, I was genuinely annoyed by the project and the film's narration from the start. For all its focus on being organic and authentic, there is something distinctly artificial and performative about the whole aesthetic, like a Thomas Kinkade painting on screen as brought to you by Hallmark but with a West Coast granola vibe, and mostly absent of examining the larger ecosystem the Chesters are a part of, namely California and the USA. Baby animals sure are cute though.
It's cute! It's heartwarming! I liked it! Not the best documentary I've ever seen but it gets the job done. Inspiring enough and a nice evening watch.
Annoyed to the core by this jackass farmer's incessant and asinine voiceover, perhaps most of all when he expresses shock at his bonding with animals that will "become food." Or when he reveals that staring up at the Milky Way makes him feel small.
This is a mind-numbing TLC series dressed up as a feature film. If you want to see footage of cute animals (especially ones that aren't raised to be slaughtered), you could just try Instagram.
Narrator: This is our pregnant pig that has intense diarrhea.
Me, crying and feeling very seen: Representation matters.
