Like many farm-to-table foodies, filmmaker John Chester and his chef wife Molly talked about the dream of living off the land.
But this idealistic couple actually took the next step and did it, buying 200 acres north of Los Angeles. Their aim: to create an old-school farm with a wide range of food production and biodiversity, rather than specializing in a single crop and relying on pesticides.
Their reality: arid land, a nonstop flood of problematic predators and potentially disastrous winds and wildfire.
Despite all the hardships, director/writer/narrator Chester, an Emmy-winner for his farm-themed short films, makes “The Biggest Little Farm” an optimistically riveting tour through their first seven years there.
His nature cinematography is stunning; he’s got an eye for the beauty to be found even in the most unlikely of places (maggots, anyone?). And he’s got a lot of help in the farm’s cast of characters.
Go ahead and try not to be charmed by the friendship between Emma the pig and Greasy the rooster.
In a time when climate news is near-uniformly depressing, this is a nature documentary that pays loving and hopeful tribute to the complex web of life — and it won’t scare your kids.