Urban farming activism a timely theme in ‘Occupy The Farm’

For Darling, the movie is an example of what average, everyday people can accomplish if they stick together.

By Leslie Katz
San Francisco Examiner
Apr 15, 2021

Excerpt:

n 2012, director Todd Darling embarked on “Occupy The Farm,” a movie about activist urban farmers who took over a patch of East Bay land owned by University of California, Berkeley with a distinct goal about the task at hand.

“From the beginning, my feeling was, ‘I was not doing a news story, I was making a film,’” says Darling, whose 90-minute documentary about the long-contested land was released in 2014 to mostly positive reviews and success on the independent film circuit.

Now, with its broadcast television premiere on PBS next week, Darling says the movie’s themes are even more pressing than they were during the 2012 controversy, which started on Earth Day when activist farmers invaded and started planting seedlings on Gill Tract, a parcel of farmland in Albany with a long, complicated history that UC Berkeley planners were slating for commercial uses.

Though the trespassing activists and supportive community members brought police and scuffles to the gated area, the film ends with victory for the intrepid farmers, as least in part because Whole Foods grocery store dropped out of the university’s development scheme.

“It was jaw-dropping when that happened. No matter how they were going to spin it, having their anchor tenant leave, it had to be viewed as a bad turn of events,” says Darling, who adds that the farmland faces a new threat today, with the university announcing plans to build a large dorm for hundreds of students that would be operated by a Texas company that specializes in these types of privatization projects.

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