"Ireland, 1845. To Briana Walsh, no place on earth is more beautiful than Carrowteige, County Mayo, with its sloping fields and rocky cliffs perched above the wild Atlantic. The small farms that surround the centuries-old Lear House are managed by her father, agent to the wealthy, reckless Sir Thomas Blakely. Tenant farmers sell the oats and rye they grow to pay rent to Sir Thomas, surviving on the potatoes that flourish in the remaining scraps of...

In the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s, two farming families one of white landholders, and one of Black tenant farmers are bound by the unforgiving soil they share as they struggle to survive amid the upheavals of World War II and the poisonous hatred of the Jim Crow South. Each family sends a young man off to battle; when they return home, scarred, and find a common bond, the community is ripped apart. Writer-director Dee Rees, with co-writer Virgil...

Tol'able David is a magnificent film, carefully transferred from the best available elements, and starring the great Richard Barthelmess (Broken Blossoms) in the title role. This rural adaptation of the David and Goliath tale chronicles the hero's passage into adulthood as he confronts three crooks looking for trouble. When the story opens, David Kinemon, the youngest son of tenant farmers living in small-town West Virginia, yearns to be seen as an...

The story of the 1939 Missouri sharecroppers strike reveals the complex issues of cotton farming in the early 1930s and what it was like to be a sharecropper in that time. One wintry morning in January 1939, residents of southeastern Missouri awoke to a startling sight. More than 1,000 sharecroppers - mostly African American but whites too - had camped out alongside two state highways with their families and a few meager belongings. They were taking...