About the Film
By leveraging the very land that has been in his family for generations, JOHN MARTIN (Herman Johansen) and his wife MARY LOU (Kathleen Warfel) expanded their family farm into the largest in Sumner County, Kansas. Now, as crop and land prices fall, John and Mary Lou face the impending loss of the only life they’ve ever known.
The Land is a remarkably beautiful story about a real-world marriage on the very precipice of an uncertain future. Like the ever-shifting Kansas winds that daily buffet their farm, Mary Lou’s regard for John turns without warning. From calm to calamitous, she cannot pretend to be more than she is, nor to feel less than she does. And John, once confident, determined, and proud, seems incapable of turning back the clock and putting things right. Just as the changing seasons dictate when to plant and when to harvest, how John and Mary Lou navigate this new terrain will ultimately determine their yield.
Director’s Statement:
It is an extremely difficult time for America’s family farmers. Although typically considered exemplars of a unique and heroic stoicism in the face of uncertainty and hardship, there is always a breaking point. At the same time increased mechanization has led to record crop yields, rising protectionism and global trade tensions have led to decreases in the demand for US agricultural products. The results have been devastating: Over the past five years alone, farm income in the United States has fallen by almost fifty percent, leaving many farmers—most of whom live and work on land that has belonged to their families for generations—barely able to survive. Not surprisingly, the incidence of rural depression and suicide, so seldom discussed by farmers and their families and even less so by the national media, has soared to such an extent that the rate of farmland suicides is today over twice as high as that of military veterans.
Filmed entirely on location in rural Kansas and Missouri, The Land tells the story of sixty-something farmers John and Mary Lou Martin (brilliantly played by veteran Kansas City actors Herman Johansen and Kathleen Warfel), as they come face-to-face with mistakes from their pasts and an uncertain future as they desperately strive to hold onto the only life they've ever known. Inspired people everywhere who have been set adrift by circumstances that leave them too old to start over and yet too young to give up, The Land explores a question of deep significance: "Are we more than what we do?"
—Stephen Wallace Pruitt