“Homeface Under Fire” – Farm Aid’s Documentary about America’s Farm Crisis, and Farm Advocates

www.FarmAid.org

Farm Aid’s director Carolyn Mugar and co-founder @johnmellencamp introduced Farm Aid’s film, Homeplace Under Fire, at @dukeuniversity tonight.

www.homeplaceunderfire.org

The Farm Crisis of the 1980s drove hundreds of thousands of family farmers into foreclosure. Yet, out of that crisis arose a legion of farm advocates who refused to stand idly by and watch their way of life be destroyed.

Ordinary Americans taught themselves extraordinary skills. As fellow farmers, farm wives, and rural leaders, they studied laws and regulations, started hotlines, answered farmers’ calls from their kitchen tables, counseled their neighbors, and went toe-to-toe with lenders – giving their all to keep their neighbors on the land.

Homeplace Under Fire celebrates these advocates and their remarkable work. Thousands of farmers are alive and on their land today because of them. As Willie Nelson has said, these advocates are the best of America.

Homeplace Under Fire was directed by Charles D. Thompson, Jr. and produced by Farm Aid in cooperation with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

About the Director

Charles D. Thompson Jr

Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Documentary Studies at Duke University

Back in the early 1980s, I worked as a farm advocate at the Rural Advancement Fund, operating a hotline and responding to calls from farmers all over the Carolinas.

Becoming part of the growing national network of people responding to the Farm Crisis, my colleagues and I chose a local dairy farmer to attend the first Farm Aid concert. He returned ready to organize his neighbors and fight farm foreclosures. I cheered this creative and powerful response by musicians, always grateful to Willie Nelson and his friends for caring about family farmers.

In the decades since, I have continued to work on international agricultural crises, endeavoring to tell about what I have learned in lectures, books, and films. But I have always looked to the years I spent as a farm advocate for inspiration.When Farm Aid came to me in 2015 to ask me to direct the project that would become Homeplace Under Fire, I was deeply grateful. The opportunity allowed me to bring my years of experience – from growing up working with my grandparents on their farm to my documentary work – into a compilation of so much that I care about. Working with Willie Nelson and the Farm Aid staff felt like a homecoming. The team I put together to make the film are some of the best in the field.

Most special of all, this opportunity gave me the chance to work with the Farm Advocates featured in this film. Their stories make me believe all over again in liberty and justice for all. They make me believe that we can make a difference if we try.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 20th, 2017 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Farm Aid, John Mellencamp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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“Homeface Under Fire” – Farm Aid’s Documentary about America’s Farm Crisis, and Farm Advocates

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