He may have traveled through multiple continents to film the humble daily experience of small farmers, but the thing that Mathieu Roy best succeeds at capturing in The Dispossessed is time. We experience the weight of every second, every hour, every week lived by the protagonists, who we have to thank for our meals. With each moment, the seasons for sowing as for reaping mark a cycle that is suddenly not as universal as we once believed. Now in the Anthropocene, this grand universal order is threatened by chemistry, by business plans, by large-scale agricultural production control, by the monetized future of our relationship to land, by the debt load of farmers held captive by monoculture. And by the progressive ignorance of agricultural workers. The key moment in this documentary: a Western farm worker who, despite his agricultural degrees, says he only understood what his soil has been like for decades after having worked with it professionally. After having stripped it, essentially. What he has learned is simply the correlation between chemical additions that he administers and the production that follows. We watch as he is taken aback by the discovery of the millions of microscopic living species in this earth that he must kill under the auspices of making it fertile for the benefit of his creditors.

Alain Deneault
Philosopher