The Farm
Directed by Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack
Produced by Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack
Opened theatrically at New York's Film Forum on June 10, 1998
Premiered on A&E in September, 1998
1998 Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance
1998 Academy Award Nominee
1999 Two-time Primetime Emmy Award winner
Set in America's most infamous and largest maximum security prison, THE FARM tells an extraordinary story about life and death in prison. Louisiana State Penitentiary's 18,000 acres stretch along the Mississippi River, revealing landscapes of breathtaking beauty and fertile farm land, yet for the five thousand men who enter the gates for the first time as young men, never to leave again, it is a place of infamy, a land of suffering, made up of shattered lives and discarded souls. This is THE FARM.
THE FARM refracts the spectrum of life's somber passages for a population facing life imprisonment. Focusing on the rites of passage of six men over the course of one year, the film articulates each man's struggle to sustain hope and achieve ever-elusive freedom. In their mirrored circumstances, each arrival, departure and defeat becomes a chilling confirmation of life's bitter inevitability.
THE FARM paints an intimate portrait of the world of Angola with the help of one of the prison's oldest and certainly it's best known resident, Wilbert Rideau. Rideau, a former death row inmate and now nationally acclaimed print and video journalist and criminal justice expert, guarantees a level of intimacy and insight rarely achieved in prison films. He takes us into the cells and dormitories, death row banquets and funerals, the AIDS wing of the hospital, the ever growing cemetery and the "free" village within the prison that third and fourth generation guards call home.
Warden Burl Cain, known as the 'master' in this modern day prison plantation, describes his philosophy for running a peaceful prison: "you've got to keep the inmates workin' all day so they're tired at night". And so it goes: each morning, six days a week, 52 weeks a year for the rest of their lives, thousands of men, 90% African American, head out to the fields, hoes and shovels in hand, with white overseers on horseback and rifles at their side. Nothing much has changed on this plot of land over the last 250 years.
There are over 2,000,000 prisoners in America today and the number is growing daily. Five thousand of them are living out their lives at Angola. Eighty-five percent of those who enter the gates as young men, will die in Angola. In following life at Angola for a year, harvest to harvest, guided by the insight of Rideau on the one hand and the Warden on the other, THE FARM tells a unique story of hope and struggle, of triumph and tragedy.
THE FARM was the recipient of the 1998 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, an Academy Award nomination, 2 Emmy Awards, The Best Documentary Prize from The New York Film Critics Circle, The Los Angeles Film Critics Association, The Santa Barbara Film Festival, and The National Society of Film Critics, The Golden Spire Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Audience Award from the DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival. A short version of the film aired on Great Britain's Channel 4, where the film was named "Best Documentary" by the London Times.
- To purchase this video please visit www.amazon.com