The Grasslands Project - Generations
2016 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Scott Parker
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Nineteen-year-old Shawn Catherwood has always planned to farm like his father Ken, even as other young people leave small communities. Father and son navigate the coming generational handover on the family farm.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Here's a film that could've been a Hallmark special about heritage and duty, but Parker refuses the sentiment—there's a quiet refusal in how he lets silences sit, a documentary that doesn't *want* you to feel moved, just present. That restraint is the subversion.
A formally precise portrait of generational continuity shot through a documentary lens that honors both the agrarian tradition and the formal rigor of the *Grasslands Project* series—the kind of measured, observational work that sits comfortably alongside the best of Canadian doc cinema.
The entire film pivots on Parker's choice to let the landscape *breathe* as a third character rather than backdrop; that decision—to hold wide shots of the land longer than the dialogue would suggest—transforms a straightforward handover story into something about what the earth witnesses.