Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry

Writer, poet and thinker Wendell Berry could have spent his life teaching at college campuses, working in offices, living in cities, chasing work opportunities around the country. Instead, he returned home to Henry County, Kentucky, where he bought a piece of land and began a rooted and deliberate life of farming, raising a family, writing and teaching. This lifelong relationship with the land and community would form the foundation of his prolific writings. It also forms the core of this thoughtful film, using Berry’s biography as a springboard to examine the drastic changes that have swept agriculture in the United States. What was once a lifestyle rife with agrarian values of simplicity, stewardship and rootedness transitioned before Berry’s eyes into a capital-intensive model of industrial agriculture, machine labor, soil erosion and debt. In this way, Look & See becomes a greater story of, to use Berry’s famous title, “the unsettling of America.”