Director/producer Ines Sommer and producer Terra Brockman (photo credit Alex Sing)

By Cassandra West

Ines Sommer began the documentary “Seasons of Change on Henry’s Farm” thinking it could be filmed in one weekend. She miscalculated by — a lot. “Instead, I filmed for multiple years,” she says.

Sommer started the documentary in 2014 when a young photographer, who had tried to make a documentary about the Central Illinois farm, asked Sommer to help. The photographer dropped out of the project. By then Sommer had become enthralled by her subjects, particularly Henry’s sister Terra Brockman, author of the 2009 book, “The Seasons on Henry’s Farm: A Year of Food and Life on a Sustainable Farm.”

“She is so cool,” Sommer says of Terra Brockman, founder of The Land Connection, a Champaign-based educational nonprofit that trains farmers in resilient, restorative farming techniques. Brockman eventually became the film’s co-producer.

“I really thought [the documentary] would be a short, kind of just profiles of the people who bring us good food,” says Sommer, associate director of the MFA in Documentary Media program at Northwestern University, during an interview. “The main thrust was to also look into the hard work that goes into that. But once I got to know Henry and his family better, I was just intrigued.”

Indeed, Henry Brockman is not your usual Central Illinois farmer. As a young man, he had spent several years in Japan, where he met and married his wife, Hiroko. When he proposed, he told her he wanted to be an organic farmer—back in Illinois. For more than 25 years now, together they have raised three children on a lush 12-acre farm outside of tiny Congerville, where they grow an astonishing 650 vegetable varieties.

So here you have “this part-Japanese family in Central Illinois,” Sommer says. “There was something there that was really just fascinating.” Plus, Sommer adds, “I really enjoyed talking with Henry’s wife, Hiroko.”

When Sommer was several months into the project, Henry made an unexpected announcement. It was the kind of out-of-the-blue that a good documentary filmmaker will roll with, though it would ultimately change the story Sommer thought she was telling.

She recalls: “Henry sprang the news that he was going to spend all of 2015 in Japan and he was going to put his former apprentices in charge. And I’m like, ‘what farmer takes a sabbatical?” This is so unusual.’ ”

And the filming rolled on. Though, Sommer didn’t have the resources to travel with Henry and Hiroko to Japan, she hired a cameraman to capture some of their time in the country.

While Henry and Hiroko were away, the young farmer and his wife whom they had left in charge struggled to keep the farm afloat.

Without giving away more, suffice it to say that the documentary is a true testament to the plight of small farmers everywhere.

In the documentary, which makes its Midwest premier at One Earth Film Festival, you get a real sense of Henry’s Midwestern work ethic, his passion for the land, the soil and the food he grows.

“My goal as a farmer is I want my field to look as much like nature as possible,” Henry says in the documentary, completed in 2019. You see him walking his fields, his dirt-covered hands making notes about row upon row of vegetable he’s planted. You see him rising well before the crack of dawn to load this truck for his weekly trips to sell his Asian vegetables at the Evanston’s Farmers Market. You see him confront what farming means in a time of climate change.

“We didn’t set out to make that [kind] of film,” explains Sommer, whose camerawork has been featured in numerous award-winning projects, including broadcast documentaries for major Chicago production companies Kartemquin Films and Kindling Group. She also didn’t want to take a predictable approach but to see where the story led. “And I’m glad I did,” she says.

Sommer says “Seasons of Change” isn’t an advocacy film, but she does wish that people will leave it with a different mindset about food production. Her own interest in agriculture has been heightened. She believes the public should “be more informed about how food production and climate change are completely interlinked.

“In the Midwest, it’s pretty easy to ignore climate change to a certain degree,” she says. “It’s not hitting us in an extreme way. So, to learn from this story that it’s here already and that we need to be compelled to action just as people on the coasts, I’d like for audiences to take that away.”

You can view “Seasons of Change on Henry’s Farm” Thursday, March 12 at Patagonia Chicago, 48 E. Walton St., Chicago. A reception begins at 5:30 p.m., film screening at 6:30 p.m. Admission is $20. Tickets.

After the film, stay for the Q&A with director Ines Sommer. Also learn about local action opportunities via FamilyFarmed and the Urban Canopy. Discussion facilitated by Karen Kitto, from Oak Park’s District 97 PTO Council and the Brooks Middle School Green Team.