"The Garden" is an Academy Award nominated documentary chronicling the drama of South Central LA Farmers and their struggle to keep their community garden. It's a really engaging piece of filmmaking. This from a person who in general gets awfully bored during most documentaries. It's illuminating, upsetting, and inspiring. As someone who used to live in Los Angeles I was mostly intrigued by the racial investigation that this film lightly addresses as well. In a city as diverse as LA one would think that having a sense of pride in the community would be a relatively easy exercise but the disparity between the rich and the poor in that city is so dramatic and the racial divisions are so clearly defined that instead there's a quiet and passive violent bitterness simmering just below the surface as made evident by explosions such as the LA Riots in the early 1990s and illustrated dramatically in the film "Crash". These tensions are very real and incredibly legitimate. The city always seems perched on the edge of a knife. "The Garden" is one instance of many in which people strive for their piece of the LA community. It's a great watch. Rent it. Trailer here.
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