A still from the film 'Greener Pastures' with a farmer cutting up a tree trunk with a chain saw in a field with his dog.
Sam Mirpoorian covered a lot of distance while making his first full-length documentary, Greener Pastures, driving 60,000 miles over four years to follow four farm families in the Midwest. In the first couple of years he mostly traveled alone since he couldn’t pay anyone else.
“I had $20,000,” says Mirpoorian, who started work on the project in 2018 when he was 24 years old and in school at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering in Indianapolis. Greener Pastures will play along with the documentary short The Last Milk at the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 16.
Mirpoorian’s best friend Adam Oppenheim, the director of photography for Greener Pastures, planted the seed for the film, mentioning in conversation the high rate of suicide among farmers. Soon after Mirpoorian heard an NPR story about a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finding that farmers had the highest rate of suicide among all professions in the United States.
Mirpoorian, who lives in his hometown of Indianapolis, then took about six months to do the “groundwork and discovery” for the film, talking to more than 30 farmers and determining where it was best to tell the story.
Locating families willing to share such intimate details of their lives was like “finding a needle in a haystack,” he says. He ultimately found farmers in four states around the Midwest. The film opens with Jeff Ditzenberger, a farmer in Monroe, Wisconsin, being interviewed on radio by Pam Jahnke, aka “The Fabulous Farm Babe.”
It’s 2018 and the two talk about falling crop prices and the toll that economic uncertainties are taking on the mental health of farmers. “When I started my nonprofit foundation I’d get a couple of calls a month,” says Ditzenberger, who founded TUGS in 2013 to address the stigma around suicide. “My board and myself are averaging a couple of calls a day now.”
Mirpoorian eventually landed additional funding for Greener Pastures through Doc Society, whose mission is to “bring people together to unleash the transformational power of documentary film,” and David J. and Linda A. Cornfield, the executive producers of such films as Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the documentary about Mister Fred Rogers.
Working with these “impact producers” changed the way Mirpoorian thought about his work. “I never considered film as having an impact,” he says. “I just wanted to create art and move on to the next project.” Now, he says, he sees how impact producers make a difference. “They really help audiences galvanize around films and their messages to promote conversations, legislation, community engagement.” Learning about social issues through film can be more “digestible” to people, adds Mirpoorian, than trying to read about issues or going to a town hall meeting.
Mirpoorian learned some things himself while making the film. “I never really had an appreciation or understanding of the value of farmers,” he says. “Farmers are the reason humans exist because they feed us. I don’t think people have an appreciation for it. I was the same way. I never really thought about it.”
Mirpoorian has won numerous awards for his documentary shorts that have played at film festivals around the country. Little Warriors, about youth activism around climate policy, was a grand prize winner at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis, and Sonnie, about a single father raising his son, won three Regional Emmy Awards and was acquired by NBC for streaming on Peacock (it is also available free here).
See our other 2023 Wisconsin Film Fest coverage here.
