In the Garden on the Farm
2020 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Kristin Catherwood
Genres: drama, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
During COVID-19 social distancing, Kristin Catherwood returns to her widowed father's farm, where spring planting and her vegetable garden stir memories of her mother and grandmothers.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a quiet grief essay dressed up as a farm film—not subversive enough to surprise, too earnest to interrogate its own nostalgia. The garden-as-memory metaphor is exactly what you'd expect, which means it's probably not for me.
Catherwood's layering of intergenerational presence through soil, seed, and seasonal ritual sits firmly in the lineage of lyric essay cinema—Chloé Zhao's restraint, Debra Granik's ecological attentiveness—and the formal decision to let the garden's work speak louder than voiceover shows real curatorial discipline.
The key move here is silence: rather than narrate the mother's absence, Catherwood lets your hands in the dirt do the remembering, and that single choice—privileging tactile presence over explanation—transforms what could've been sentimental into something genuinely haunting.