‘Farming While Black’ documentary screened for Black History Month

Graphic by Delaney Gardner ’26

Kannille Washington ’28

Staff Writer

The Miller Worley Center for the Environment and the Growing Vines Collective, a BIPOC-centered group invested in environmental justice, screened the documentary “Farming While Black” on Feb. 18. The documentary highlights the Soul Fire Farm in New York State and the visionary Black Kreyol farmer Leah Penniman, who is working to stop food injustice and the racism in which it is rooted. Soul Fire Farm has been visited by Mount Holyoke College students from the Growing Vines Collective and is a cherished space for anyone, whatever their farming background, to connect with the movement. 

The documentary first introduces viewers to siblings Leah and Naima Penniman, who grew up in the rural Northeast. As sometimes one of the only brown families in town, they had a unique and down to earth upbringing, living mainly off the land and spending most of their free time in nature. Their little house in the woods is where their love for the environment and their love for farming started.

As Leah grew older, she went to school and got married. She and her husband lived in the city for a time and attempted an all natural lifestyle, but eventually found themselves taking out a loan and buying land in the country. They brought life back to the soil and built their house by hand. The Soul Fire Farm is now a community staple and the place where Leah eventually wrote her book, “Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land.”

Leah speaks in the film of what she calls “food apartheid,” which refers to the discrepancies among communities of color and their access to fresh food. When discussing the history of Black farmers in the United States in her book, she writes, “The only consistent story I’d seen or been told about Black people and the land was about slavery and sharecropping, about coercion and brutality and misery and sorrow. And yet here was an entire history, blooming into our present, in which Black people’s expertise and love of the land and one another was evident.” 

This idea of justice and liberation is not foreign to the students of Mount Holyoke College. Our own Growing Vines Collective hosts many events on campus for students to take a part in the liberation of communities of color. Our own Miller Worley Center also encourages students to take part in collective actions to cultivate the environment around them.

Growing Vines members Sara Abubo ’25, Ceylon Phillips ’26 and Cindie Huerta ’25 led an after panel discussion about any takeaways and connections to the film. In an email interview with Mount Holyoke News, attendee Catalina McFarland ’28 spoke about her takeaways from the screening. 

“The idea of reclaiming land as a site of healing stood out to me most from the documentary. The land has so often been, as Penniman puts it, ‘the scene of the crime’ — of dispossession, slave labor, and exploitation — but it was never the source of evil. Her message is that the land revives us if we commit to reviving it, by storing carbon, revitalizing ecosystems, feeding communities, and healing trauma,” McFarland said.

Quill Nishi-Leonard ’27 contributed fact-checking.

Season three of Yellowjackets is in bloom, but not blossoming

Graphic by Mari Al Tayb ’26

By Sarah Berger ’27

Arts and Entertainment editor 

This article contains spoilers for seasons one and two of Yellowjackets, as well as episodes one, two and three of season three.

Season three of “Yellowjackets” begins with a scene that echoes episodes past: A teenage girl runs through the woods, feverishly pursued by other teenage girls with the intensity and anger of a pack of wolves. Thankfully, this time they’re actually playing a spirited game of “capture the bone.” It ends in excited chants from the winners and disappointment from the losers, but not mutilation or death. The experienced “Yellowjackets” viewer knows how rare this is. 

In the first season, after the plane of a New Jersey girls’ soccer team goes down in the Canadian Rockies on their way to nationals, the team immediately breaks away from their suburban roots. The show takes place in two timelines, one immediately after the crash and one twenty-five years later, as the survivors begin to reckon with their pasts and futures. The show lured viewers in with promises of cannibalism, then proceeded to deliver not only cannibalism but adultery, murder, suicide, addiction, implied posession and various other lurid evils. 

If that sounds like a lot to digest, it absolutely is. By the time season three starts, the viewer has seen it all, and the girls have done, if not all of it, most of it. “Yellowjackets” frequently teeters on the edge of darkness, but never quite fully descends until the final episodes of season two. The youngest, most innocent character is killed and cooked, the shelter the team has found is burned to the ground, and in the final moments of the last episode, one of the four original surviving Yellowjackets — a nickname based off of their soccer team’s mascot — dies at the hands of another. 

With all of that baggage, season three needs a palate cleanser. Thankfully, spring has come. At least for the moment, the girls don’t have to worry about eating. The first scenes of season three are promising, with floral motifs and dialogue between the girls that reminds you that they’re ultimately still just kids. Sadly, the appeal doesn’t last long, as the show cuts at breakneck speed back to a present timeline that ultimately doesn’t serve the plot. The past timeline is by far the most compelling thing about the show, but it seems to take up almost no time next to the present timeline, which increasingly relies on silly twists and melodrama in place of actual character development. “Yellowjackets” can’t decide if it wants to be a horror comedy or not, and that leads to some incredibly uncomfortable scenes where a character’s alcoholic breakdown is half-played for laughs, half-taken seriously. 

Midway through the second episode of the season, two characters in the present timeline kill a waiter by inducing a heart attack after a dine-and-dash pursuit. Part of the appeal of “Yellowjackets” certainly lies in unrelenting misery, but come on. Give them a break. One of the characters is already dying of cancer and another has lost her family and regularly hallucinates an evil, “bad” version of herself. If you’re not a “Yellowjackets” watcher, you might be rolling your eyes at the melodrama. As a seasoned “Yellowjackets” watcher, it’s hard for me not to join you. Don’t worry, though. The waiter’s death has a happy outcome: The cancer has stopped metastasizing, a miracle that likely occurred due to their service to the ambiguous entity that’s followed them since the woods. 

It was never going to be a happy show, but at a certain point, there’s a limit to the bad things that can happen to the girls before their characters are fully defined by their tragedies. That’s not to say that their reactions to their experiences are unrealistic, but that their experiences, at a certain point, become a constant onslaught of trauma with various light moments in between. It feels as though the showrunners are watching the audience wince at the sociopathy of the characters and asking, “Well, don’t they have a right to do that?” The answer is, of course, yes. However, they might also do well to ask why anyone would want to watch.

Quill Nishi-Leonard ’27 contributed fact-checking.

Film Society hosts Oscars watch party in Gamble Auditorium

Photo by Mary Grahn ’28

By Mary Grahn ’28

Staff Writer

On the evening of Mar. 2, celebrities and seat fillers alike filled Los Angeles’ Dolby Theater to watch the Oscars, an event far away from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Yet, despite the thousands of miles that separate Mount Holyoke students from the biggest night in film, the awards occupied the minds of many. This was particularly true among the students who gathered in Gamble Auditorium for the Film Society’s Oscars viewing party.

The event in Gamble started at 6:45 p.m., as students began arriving and picking up their Oscars bingo cards, which promised a plastic award to the winners. Around 7 p.m., after some brief technical difficulties, the students organizing the event were able to start the stream of the Oscars midway through Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s performance of a “Wicked” medley.

 Soon, laughs and gasps spread across the auditorium as the host of the Oscars, Conan O’Brien emerged from a cavity in Demi Moore's back. This bizarre image, a parody of a scene in Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar-nominated film “The Substance,” amused and shocked many students in the auditorium.

Throughout the awards, students chatted about the actors and actresses who appeared and what films they wanted to win. Although students rooted for the films that would benefit their bingo cards, they also had their personal opinions on the films they think should have won, which may have differed from the films they predicted would win. 

For Film Society co-president Victoria Faulkner ’25, the question of what film she thought should win best picture was difficult. “I was torn between ‘Anora’ and ‘Conclave,’” Faulkner shared in an email interview with Mount Holyoke News. 

“Anora” was one of Faulkner’s favorite films. She was particularly struck by its “gut-wrenching sadness” and its “commentary on how finding yourself as someone in-between cultures is hard.”  The film’s many wins, including Best Picture, was a delight to see and well-deserved, according to Faulkner. “The Academy has historically snubbed both Sean Baker and movies about sex workers, and I was really scared Anora would be subject to the same treatment,” she added.

 As for Conclave, which the Film Society hosted a screening of earlier this week, Faulkner “[could] not find a flaw in [it],” and believes Ralph Fiennes should have won Best Actor for his portrayal of Cardinal Lawrence. “His role as Cardinal Lawrence is, in my opinion, the best of his career. He brings a fear, piety and fervor to the screen that is both so personal and tender but detached,” she said.

Other films nominated for Best Picture included “Emilia Pérez,” “A Complete Unknown,” “Nickel Boys,” “I’m Still Here,” “The Substance,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Wicked” and “The Brutalist.” Regarding the controversial “Emilia Pérez” nomination, Faulkner said, “The Academy frankly ought to be more ashamed that ‘Emilia Pérez’ was ever even considered — much less a recipient of — 13 nominations. As for the [two] wins, I don’t have much opinion beyond the prevailing concern that we’re awarding a movie or performances from a movie so steeped in anti-Mexican racism, so intentional in [its] linking of transgender and broadly LGBTQ+ people to predatory or criminal behavior, and frankly, so objectively poorly written.” 

Despite the few controversies that surrounded the Oscars ceremony, the Film Society’s Oscars viewing party brought the College’s film-loving community together for a night of joy and celebration, and some lucky bingo players even got a plastic trophy out of it.

Quill Nishi-Leonard ’27 contributed fact-checking.