Sara Archambault of LEF Foundation, who has been a steadfast supporter of our film Betting The Farm from the beginning, interviewed us for LEF’s blog the other day about the process of shooting the film, the relationships we’ve built with our characters, and our brief video summary of the MOO Milk story for the New York Times:
Sara: You are shooting BETTING THE FARM at a time when a number of films are coming out exploring our relationship to food. Your film is unique in that it looks closely at farmers as small business owners and entrepreneurs. Can you talk about why you chose to focus on that experience?
Cecily Pingree: There have been a number of excellent films about food and food policy in the last several years, and we’ve learned that audiences really respond to these issues. They are vital human concerns, and they resonate across geographical, socioeconomic and cultural boundaries.
But we never set out to make a movie about the larger political and environmental issues at all. We stumbled on this story when we met one of the MOO Milk farmers, Aaron Bell of Tide Mill Organic Farm, while shooting another project. From the very beginning, we were interested in this story because of the people involved. Character-driven stories are what we like to watch, and what we get excited about, so it feels natural to us to focus on the lives of these farmers and their families rather than, say, the complexities of dairy pricing. That said, hopefully someone else will make that film!
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