Saturday, August 27, 2005
American Farm Movie Coming to New York in September
State University of New York at Purchase
September 28th - 7:00 pm
Purchase, New York
Choral Hall of the Music Building
914-251-6860
Director James Spione, an alumnus of the SUNY Purchase Film Department, will introduce the film and lead a discussion after the screening.
Friends- Please see this film. This is a beautifully told narrative of a dairy farm family in New York State.
Read the following review from the Syracuse Post Standard.
See:
http://www.americanfarmmovie.com
‘American Farmer’ has story to tell
By Frank Herron
Staff writer
The Ames family has kept its Richfield Springs dairy farm going for about 150 years. But Langdon “Lanny” Ames, the fifth generation, marks the end of the line.
Debt’s not the problem. Neither is mismanagement. Nor bad health.
The last of the Ames farmers, who’s nearing 70, has nobody waiting to take over, something he did in the early 1960s.
The arc of farm life on the property, about two miles west of Richfield Springs and less than 20 miles north of Cooperstown, has been captured in an 80-minute documentary called “American Farm.” It will be shown at 3 p.m. Saturday at the Everson Museum.
Director Jim Spione drew upon 20 hours of interviews with family members and various photographs and documents. The result is a profile of more than a century’s worth of farming in
Upstate New York and an introduction to the final Ames farmer.
Spione takes the project personally. His mother grew up on the farm. Shirley Ames went on to graduate at Syracuse University in the late 1940s and begin a career in the field of education.
The screening at the Syracuse International Film & Video Festival marked the first festival appearance for the movie. It premiered at the Farmers Museum in Cooperstown in February. Earlier this month, he showed it to a group in Rhinebeck.
“People seemed to be almost shocked by how emotional the film is,” Spione says.
It helped, Spione acknowledges, that he had a family connection - prompting more openness.
“If it was a filmmaker from outside the family, I don’t think they would have gone there,” he says.
His look at the hard work and hard decisions that farmers face nowadays illustrate greater issues, he says.
The film shows how people face the “loss of an old-fashioned idea of a rural community,” he says.
© 2005 The Post-Standard. Used with permission.
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