The PBS film highlights the toll industrial agriculture is taking on rural America

Wendell Berry hates screens. The 83-year-old novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and Kentucky-based farmer is of the mind that TV and technological devices serve to degrade the imagination and threaten literature. His distaste for idolatry is part of why he’s turned down several requests to be featured in documentary projects. Tomorrow evening, however, a cinematic portrait of America’s foremost “prophet of rural America” hits the PBS airwaves. Look & See: Wendell Berry’s Kentucky, part of the Independent Lens series, portrays the changing landscapes and shifting values of rural America in an era dominated by industrial agriculture, through the eyes of Wendell Berry. 

This is a film that subverts biopic conventions. Berry doesn’t frequently appear on screen, but audiences are immersed into his world. The film makes liberal use of his prescient, poetic words and features illuminating testimonies from his family members and neighbors, and from fellow farmers in his native Henry County, Kentucky. Look & See counts Robert Redford and Terrence Malick as executive producers and Laura Dunn as director.