The eighth annual Farm and Film Gala, co-presented by Awareness Film Night and Sooke Region Food CHI, will be held April 11 at Edward Milne Community School in Sooke.
The evening will feature vendors of gardening and farming-related items and wares, including seeds, plant starts and some of the season’s first produce, information tables from local non-profits, tea and goodies made by EMCS culinary arts students, gift basket giveaways and the film The Evolution of Organic.
Academy-award nominated filmmaker Mark Kitchell’s insightful 2017 documentary the Evolution of Organic retraces the first steps of the back to the landers, spiritual seekers and farmers’ sons and daughters who rejected chemical farming and set out to explore the organic alternative in the 1960s.
Kitchell is known for documenting social change movements and in this film he skillfully takes his audience from those rebellious pioneer beginnings including lessons in compost-making, soil microbiology and non-toxic pest control, through the eventual creation of the organic food movement and the “Foodie” culture and ending with some of the future innovations in the organic movement such as no-till farming and urban farms.
The film is accompanied by a lively soundtrack featuring The Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, Bruce Springsteen and other artists from those legendary high times that ultimately yielded many of North America’s biggest organic growers and producers.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m.. The film starts at 7:45 p.m.
Admission is by donation. Info: www.awarenessfilmnight.ca