Bug Farm
2021 · 14m
Directed by Lydia Cornett
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Four women in Central Florida bond over crickets, superworms, and roaches on an insect farm in the small town of LaBelle.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a bug farm doc to be either gross-out spectacle or earnest eco-sermon, and Cornett refuses both—there's something genuinely uncanny about watching four women tend insects with the quiet devotion usually reserved for something sacred, and it completely wrong-foots you.
Cornett's restraint is almost classical in its discipline: she lets the LaBelle landscape and the women's hands do the compositional work, resisting the urge to sentimentalize what could easily become a whimsy piece, and the result is a doc that knows its place in the tradition of American localism.
The film's entire architecture hinges on a single recurring choice—Cornett holds on the women's faces during moments of genuine, unselfconscious focus on the insects—and that patience transforms what could be provincial novelty into something luminous about presence and care.
Reviews
The farm serves as the background to this character-led documentary focused on community members who've come to insect farming with disparate motivations–including economic opportunity, reimagining the future of food, and the love and caretaking of the bugs themselves.