In Andrew Becker & Daniel Mehrer's SANTOALLA, a near-empty Galician village mirrors immigration, culture clash and murder

In their debut film, SANTOALLA, a new documentary, Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer take us to that titular location, a word which turns out to be a kind of contraction of the actual name of the tiny village of Santa Eulalia in Galicia, Spain. Here, amidst the lovely-if-wild landscape and the charming, friendly goats, we meet an interesting couple from The Netherlands, Martin Verfondem and Margo Pool, who, two decades back, decided to leave the "big city" and find some quiet, rustic spot far from civilization where they could set up their own self-sustaining farm and home.

After traveling Europe and Asia for two years in their RV, the couple (shown below; the filmmakers are shown above, with Mr. Becker on the left), at last found what they imagined would be the perfect spot: the nearly deserted village of Santoalla, which at this point in time had only a single Galician family remaining there: an aged husband and wife and their two sons, one of whom is mentally handicapped.

What happened once Martin and Margo bought an abandoned stable, began turning it into their home, planting their crops and raising their farm animals, turned out to be not quite what this enterprising couple had in mind. Initially, however, things looked awfully good. The pair seems like as perfect a couple for this sort of endeavor as you could find.

Becker and Mehrer give us Martin and Margo's story via archival photos and film, along with interviews with Margo and the neighboring family. As tensions rise due to that family's (the husband and wife are shown below) objecting to Martin's plans for not only his and Margo's farm but for the little village itself, we also get some local television reporting, courtroom appearances, and finally, once Martin suddenly and inexplicably disappears altogether, the local police are called in.

This is a sad, depressing but not, TrustMovies thinks, all that unusual a true-life tale, particularly when tradition clashes with modernity, one culture with another, immigration raises its head (if in a rather different manner than we are sued to these days) and the power implicit in being the sole occupants of a town is suddenly challenged. Yet for all that's going on here, the documentary drags from time to time. Instead of all those lengthy tracking shots, minutes might have been better served by footage devoted to further interviews with police, as the mystery begins to be solved.

On the other hand, I suspect that the local police were maybe not so eager to give extended interviews. Certainly that neighboring family was not. From what we see of the four of them, they were never more than quasi-welcoming to begin with, and the wife/mother (shown above), in particular, contradicts herself often enough to seem an outright liar. (Either that, or she has already grown demented.)

By the end of Santoalla, we've seen and heard enough to have our appetite for resolution sated, our feeling for poor, left-alone Margo increased exponentially, and perhaps our idea of starting an organic farm in a lovely far-away location thoroughly dragged through the mud of reality. Still: those friendly, prancing little goats are fucking adorable.

From Oscilloscope Films, running 83 minutes, and in English and Galician with English subtitles, the documentary opens this Wednesday, July 19, in New York City at the Quad Cinema, on Friday July 28 in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Music Hall 3, and in Taos, New Mexico, on Sunday, August 13 at the Taos Center for the Arts.  Click here and then click on SCREENINGS on the Task Bar at top to see any subsequently scheduled screenings.

Kristin Canty's FARMAGEDDON: Food-wise, are we becoming a fascist state?

Food-wise, hell. In what ways aren't we becoming a fascist state? But that's for another movie, another blog post. Right now let's concern ourselves with a new and perky little documen-tary about the con-tinuing farm crisis, FARMAGEDDON (nice title!). The "perky" comes mainly from the movie's producer/director and sometimes narrator Kristin Canty, whose voice is so like Barbie-come-to-vocal-life that, initially, it's a little off-putting. But we get used to it quickly, and Ms Canty, below, is only a now-and-then narrator, in any case. She smartly turns her movie over to America's small farmers, many of them women, telling tales of Federal agents forcing perfectly good raw milk to be poured out over the land (two photos below), while others break into homes, taking and killing "infected" sheep, who were, it turns out, completely healthy animals.

This is strong, nasty stuff, and most of it should strike you as more than merely believable. Maybe like a plan -- but whose plan and to what purpose?  It couldn't be that the big corporations of the agri-business behemoth don't want competition from the smaller farmers who are providing much healthier food? Goodness, why would you think that?  Perhaps because you've already seen various food-related docs such as Food Inc., King Corn, Food Beware, and Think Global, Act Rural (and so many more). You will certainly think it all over again after watching this film.

Interestingly enough, Ms Canty's documentary both profits and suffers from the same thing. Instead of behaving like a professional investigative journalist who follows leads and makes connections, thereby offering some kind of scenario of what went on and why and what the motives were behind it all, she simply lets her family farmers do the talking and point the fingers. Yet they do this extremely well, with a genuineness and an anger that draws us in and plants us firmly on their side.

Still, we would have liked to known more. To her credit, Canty seems to have tried to get the government to talk, but neither its representatives (save one woman from the Maryland Department of Health) nor those of the big agri-business corporations are cooperative. So we're left to the devices of the filmmaker and her farmers. We hear about those unfortunate sheep from their owners Linda and Larry Faillace (who are still waiting for some kind of justice in this case). From Jackie Stauers and her family (above), we hear about the SWAT team that raided their home, guns drawn, one very early morning, as though the family were some kind of terrorists rather than small farmers.

As we learn, government agencies such as the USDA and the FDA don't like to be disagreed with. And they are far too chummy with the very agribusiness companies they are supposed to be regulating. (That's an unnecessary "raid" against a small farmer that they're engaged in, above.) "Lie down and let us walk over you, and you'll still be alive and working. But go up against us, and we'll destroy you" seems to be the order of the day. For all this talk about "food safety," it has never yet been the small farmer whose product serves up the dreaded e coli bacteria. Instead, when the outbreak has been traced back to its source, that source is owned by one of the huge agribusiness corporations, that -- instead of being too-big-to-fail (like our banks) -- appears too big to produce healthy food and keep it safe.

In one of the film's rare "up" moments, we meet Joel Salatin (above) of Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia, who shows us how he rotates his animals and birds (below), in a manner somewhat like crop farmers rotate their crops. This cow-and-chicken rotation makes such good sense in so many ways that, compared to the horrendous penned-up livestock and birds we see on the agribusiness "farms," Salatin's looks like some kind of paradise for the animals, while providing a lot healthier eating for us humans.

You'll come out of Ms Canty's movie angry and rightfully so. To her credit, the filmmaker gives you plenty of places to go and things to do to help ensure that the small farmers who are feeling us healthily continue to do so.

Farmageddon opened yesterday here in New York City at the Cinema Village (TM is sorry for his tardy posting) and will be hitting other theaters and cities in the weeks/months to come.  Click here to see the latest listing of playdates.

FRESH: new food documentary premieres -- with some positive ideas

Not just the shortest of the recent food films, but in some ways the most enjoy-
able, FRESH, a film by ana Sophia joanes (yes, the upper and lower case are deliberate on the film-
maker's part, though I haven't a clue as to why), offers some smart, practical ideas about good, healthy food -- where to get it and how to grow it. Unlike Food Inc.,  Food Beware, King Korn and a number of other food and farming documentaries, this one spends more time on the positive than the negative -- on what we can do to get the good food we need, rather than why big agri-business and government are colluding against us.  There's some of this in this film, but much more that is active/positive.  Perhaps Ms Joanes (shown below) figures we already know much of the negative scenario; in my case, and maybe yours, she'd be right.

Instead, we get smart looks at specific problems from people like Michael Pollan and some small organic farmers, as he and they explain clearly and succinctly the current trouble and then show us what can be done to right the wrongs: specifically getting away from the monoculture of agribusiness-grown corn, soy and rice -- as well as all the mass-produced, unhealthy meat and poultry we eat.  Capitalism is a word not spoken here, though when one speaker notes that it is time to shift to a different "paradigm," I think we know what he means.

Instead of feeding dead cows to live animals, one of our farmers grazes his herd; another tells of going from small farming to the large model and discovering within two years an array of diseases of which his animals had become victims. The charismatic Will Allen (below), a former basketball star in Europe who later worked for KFC and P&G, is now the director of Growing Power, and we spend some time with him as he demonstrates what makes for good soil (worms!) and offers other advice on organic farming.

In the course of Fresh, Mr. Pollan tells us that four huge companies -- soon to be only three --control our entire industrial food production, from seed to plate.  One of these is ADM, profiled so very delightfully in Steven Soderbergh's recent The Informant!, another is Cargill.  Yet we learn here that medium-size organic farming can be far more productive, long-term (not to mention healthy), than any size industrial version.  This, of course, must be implemented by government -- and that's Socialism, ain't it?  Whatever, let's go for it.

At the very beginning of this film, a Pakistani man notes that Americans fear only one thing: inconvenience.  Too true.  But isn't inconveni-
ence preferable to slow destruction?

See Fresh, and then toast to good eating by joining a locally-grown food co-op -- or maybe starting one.  The movie has its premier tonight at the Tribeca Cinemas and then opens Friday April 9, for its theatrical run at the NYC's Quad Cinema.  You can check all playdates and screenings nationwide here.