I highly recommend Sweet Land, an exquisite tale of racial intolerance and unlikely romance beautifully filmed and acted with admirable subtlety and restraint. I haven’t reviewed the film, but I recommend these reviews:
Managing a graceful flashback-within-a-flashback format, grandson Lars recalls a story told to him thirty years before by his grandmother, Inge (Lois Smith), about her life fifty years prior. Upon Inge’s death, Lars wrestles with a decision: to sell her land or save it for family to come? To glean wisdom, he sifts back through her story, which, like all of history, is not a list of facts and figures; it is memories. And in this case, Inge’s – not in black and white or antique sepia, but in full color, appropriate for Inge, a cultured city girl who saw the world through painterly eyes as she fell in love with Lars’ grandfather, Olaf Torvik.
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This spirit was breathed into Inge by writer/director Ali Selim, who birthed Sweet Land after working on a wearying string of antacid commercials. Enamored by Will Weaver’s short story, “A Gravestone Made of Wheat”, he knew it simply had to be his first film project. Selim befriended the simple characters of a seemingly simpler time, but he learned that making a period piece set in a 1920s Minnesota farming community was no easy task. Fourteen years after his literary epiphany, he finished shooting the film in twenty-four days on a meager $1 million budget. In a true “Americana Indie” spirit, he shot each scene in 35mm instead of digital. But that decision was not intended to be revolutionary. Selim said to Studio Daily, “I just think it’s that kind of story. There are things that should be shot digitally. It’s like, when do you use a pencil and when do you use an oil brush? It’s a decision you make based on the final outcome. It’s not ‘is digital as good as film?’ It just feels different. And this felt more like an oil painting.”
Indeed; the use of 35mm preserves an authentic past and yields the most vibrant hues – the sky so blue and the grass so green that you ache for the intense beauty of it all. The cinematography was inspired not by Selim’s favorite films, but by the American realist painters Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, as well as the clean lines and rich colors of Mark Rothko.
Directing with a light comic touch and a palpable affection for the characters, Selim draws pitch-perfect acting from a large cast (John Heard, Ned Beatty, Alan Cumming, Alex Kingston, and Lois Smith) and achieves breathtaking levels of color and clarity from old-fashioned 35mm, whether focusing on his spirited heroine’s alabaster skin or framing the couple’s tiny farmhouse against an expanse of blue sky and gently swaying grain. The film’s penny-pinching period re-creation convinces so fully that Selim seems to turn back the clock on the regional American indie too. Yet the tale of economic stratification and postwar intolerance is nothing if not timely.
Think of “Sweet Land” as a gift, the kind of delicate but deeply emotional love story, both sincere and restrained, that, like love itself, is more sought after than found.
Directed by Ali Selim in the Minnesota farmland where its story takes place, “Sweet Land” is a type of American independent we don’t see often enough, a beautifully photographed film (in 35-millimeter no less) that celebrates its regional identity. In addition, it’s sure-footed enough to tread on the borders of sentimentality without falling into that ever-seductive trap.