Aaron Woolf
2007
90 minutes
This is a short and relatively light documentary about corn production in the United States by a couple of young film students who decided to plant corn on a small parcel of land and try to trace the path of the corn from seed to harvest to market. In that respect it was ultimately a bit of an anti-climactic "failure", since they earn barely any money for their efforts, and much of what they earn is negotiated far in advance before the seed even meets the soil. The rest is a hollow ritual of sowing seeds, harvesting the corn, and then selling it to become high fructose corn syrup or cheap fuel or maybe animal fodder.
This documentary was recommended to you by a friend from the bar you go to, who found it amusing and informative. You watch most of it on the bus on a rare daytime trip to the grocery store, quite appropriately.
It reminds you a little bit of home in Indiana, despite the fact that you spent more time in the forested part of Indiana more than the corn-y agricultural part. There was of course a notorious poster that used to be sold in your campus bookstore that a few alumni still talked about that depicted a student from your engineering school decked out in ski gear on skis standing in the middle of a corn field amidst stalks of corn. The field was tilted at a 45 degree angle so that it looked as if he were skiing downhill through the field. The text for the poster featured the name of your college along with the slogan, "SKI TERRE HAUTE!" You were a bit sad that they never, to your knowledge, did a second printing of this poster, which would have been massively popular with students and visiting alums alike.
Time to choose something different: