Digital Video magazine — February 2012
Growing Appreciation: Documentarian Michael Kuehnert Works to ‘Save the Farm’

Documentary filmmaker Michael Kuehnert says he first heard about the Los Angeles South Central Farm in 2006, when he picked up a newspaper and saw a photo of his friend John Quigley sitting in a tree with fellow activist Julia Butterfly Hill. “I didn’t know anything about the farm, but I took my camera and went down there and started asking questions.”

What Kuehnert discovered was a 14-acre urban farm — the country’s largest — facing demolition from developers, who had been sold the land by the City in a closed-door deal. Defending the farm were the 350 families that had cultivated the land for over 14 years, along with a handful of activists including Quigley, Hill, Daryl Hannah and Alicia Silverstone.

Save the Farm documents the eleventh-hour struggle to save the Los Angeles South Central Farm from destruction. Using a Sony PD 150 camera mounted with a Sennheiser microphone, Kuehnert acquired over 50 hours of protest footage and interviews to create the 30-minute documentary.

“It’s not that I necessarily wanted to shoot in SD,” Kuehnert explains. “But it was a dirty, dusty environment, and I needed to be able to shoot hours and hours of footage without having to worry about downloading P2 cards and that sort of thing.”

Initially concerned about raising awareness of the South Central Farm’s plight, Kuehnert produced four shorts for CurrentTV, but eventually realized that the story could be used to help educate people about urban farming in general and inspire them to create their own urban farms. (Read full story…)