Published 8:15 am Thursday, August 8, 2024
The documentary film “Women’s Work: The Untold Story of America’s Female Farmers” will premiere this fall on the Spokane Public Broadcasting Service television station.
“I would love for the audience to be everyone, because everyone eats,” said executive producer Audra Mulkern, who lives in a small Snoqualmie Valley farming community near Seattle. “And so everyone needs to understand who’s growing their food and who has been behind the food on their table for centuries.”
Kara Rowe, CEO of KR Creative Strategies, a Washington marketing company for agricultural clients, also produced the film.
The documentary, whose runtime is about an hour, has five chapters, Mulkern said.
“Those chapters represent a time along our history when women made a big difference in agriculture,” she said.
The film starts with indigenous women, moves through American history, and closes with refugee farmers in western Washington.
Following the film’s premiere at 7 p.m. Sept. 26, it will be available for streaming through KSPS. The filmmakers are working on broader distribution and broadcasting it nationally.
Featured commodities include fiber, sugarcane, small homestead-style crops and tepary beans, a native bean from the southwest, and farms ranging from an acre to tens of thousands of acres.
“This really is a national story,” Mulkern said. “We cover everywhere from Florida to Alaska in this film. Everybody can find themselves in this film.”
Filming began in 2019, with the documentarians able to film at a Pennsylvania dairy while they were on the East Coast for other projects, then paused in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In the winter of 2022, we picked back up,” she said. “One of our storyholders lived in Alaska, and she was 102. We didn’t know if we had until the summer of 2023, so we popped up to Alaska for 48 hours and filmed our interview with her.”
Today, at 104, vegetable farmer Marge Mullen is still “amazing and sharp as a tack,” Mulkern said.
They filmed the rest of the documentary in the summer of 2023.
The pause helped them hone the film, Mulkern said: “It gave us the space to really consolidate our story and figure out what we could accomplish with the tiny, tiny budget that we had.”
Fundraising for the project began in 2018. The filmmakers launched an Indiegogo online campaign and ultimately raised about $15,000.
“It was really our desire for this to be a grassroots-supported project,” Mulkern said. “Over the years, people would donate $100 here, $50, $25. People even donate $1, and those were as meaningful to us as the big ones.”
Overall costs were about $60,000.
“It was really a micro-budget film,” she said.
The filmmakers are still accepting donations, in hopes of thanking volunteers who contributed and for post-filming costs, she said.
Much of the feedback the documentary has received so far has been “I had no idea,” Mulkern said.
“Americans in general don’t understand agricultural history, but they also don’t understand how American history has defined agricultural history,” she said. “Certain laws and policies along the way have prevented women from succeeding as much as their male counterparts. When we saw those laws go away, we saw a huge surge of women in agriculture.”
”Women’s Work: The Untold Story of America’s Female Farmers”
https://www.womensworkdocumentary.org/
