The Biggest Little Farm

Lovely footage (the dude’s a wildlife videographer) but about as sanguine as those TikToks of a divorced duck who adopts an orphaned horse and they become Best Friends, just expanded from 90 seconds to 90 minutes. Yeah we get all this Circle of Life, but I want to know the bits left out, like How to meet with investors after coyotes killed 450 chickens, or How to write college credit letters for your free hippie interns, or The best method to get pig placenta out of flannel.

To call this a documentary film is generous. It's like watching an extended advertisement, which would not be a bad thing if it was advocating for permaculture. However this is not the case; it's just pure self-indulgence on the part of the Chesters neither of who is interesting or likeable. Without the (non-human) animals this film would rate even lower.

Two rather annoying people/hipsters buys a farm and seems surprised by everything remotely connected to agriculture.

Feels a little preachy/self-congratulatory as if these folks were the first ever to come up with these ideas, but it's balanced out by some of the more genuine moments and the great camerawork.

It's a big success that the filmmaker could come up with a very classical Hollywood style story in this setting, where we basically see a struggling American family that overcomes hardships and follows its pursuit of happiness. Having said that, it is a light, sometimes heartwarming, and mostly a pedagogical (in a positive sense) movie about nature and our forgotten relationship with it.

Really great footage in a setting normally overlooked by nature docs.

Self-Congratulatory City Couple Pretends They Invented Rotational Grazing But Didn't Realize They Could Also Get Livestock Guardian Dogs for Their Chickens: The Documentary/Apricot Lane Advertisement

Entertainment: 3/4. Society: 2.5/3. Spirituality: 1.5/3. Family: 1/1.

Interesting documentary style journey of this modern couple who want to make their own traditional farm and all the dilemmas that entails