Harvesting the High Plains (2012) User Reviews

"Harvesting" manages to illuminate a slice of Dust Bowl history...it is, in my comparative view, the best Dust Bowl film of 2013.

[jcourtwright · 10/10 · 26 June 2014]

The near simultaneous release of Dust Bowl (Ken Burns) and Harvesting the High Plains (Jay Kriss) presents an opportunity to compare and contrast their, (Burns and Kriss as directors), interpretation of the 1930's drought and dust event on the Great Plains. Looking at the films together, it is apparent what each of them, separately, does well and also illustrates the flaws of each. The differences between the films are significant. Source, intent, resources, politics and emphasis - all are in sharp contrast to each other. As the credits roll, however, Harvesting the High Plains, while certainly not perfect, and burdened by the lack of the familiar Burns name and lower budget, is the better film and the better interpretation of the Dust Bowl. ... A more important difference between the two films is sources. Burns's Dust Bowl is based on interviews - and mostly interviews with people who were children during the events they remembered and described. ... Harvesting, in contrast, relies on primary source letters as the historical base of its interpretation. Garvey and others involved in their operation exchanged upward of ten thousand letters over the decades. ... At first glance, a narrower look at the Dust Bowl era, Harvesting is, in the end, more multi-dimensional than Burn's one-note, yet longer, Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s did not occur within a historical vacuum. Despite its brevity, lower budget, and focus on one large wheat operation, Harvesting manages to illuminate a slice of Dust Bowl history while not excluding agricultural history. It is, in my comparative view, the best Dust Bowl film of 2013 and provides an alternate choice to Burns's more famous effort.

J. Courtwright (Reviewer) Agricultural History Journal Spring Issue 2014

Heroes shaping hope out of the 1930's Dust Bowl tragedy

[paul-337-540260 · 8/10 · 21 November 2012]

I have just seen the new documentary, "Harvesting the High Plains," from Inspirit Creative and directed by Jay Kriss. As a point of full disclosure, I know the composer of the film score (part of the reason I'm motivated to post this review).

Director Kriss, whose work I've not seen before, hails from Kansas, which is flat as a pan and the start of the tale. "Harvesting the High Plains" is a documentary that takes place during the Dust Bowl events of the 1930's (the "Dirty 30's"), the same topic covered by Ken Burns's four-hour (!) film on the Dust Bowl that aired on PBS. Both films reshape archival footage to create a moody, immersive retelling of the time, but the screenwriters (Kriss and Sydney Duvall) take a different tack.

The sweep of the story is impressive. The story starts in the dust bowl and continues through 1947. It's clear that we're not going to hear a tale of disaster, but of the heroic efforts of farmers maintaining their lives against horrific odds. The story follows farmers working to partner with and repair the land after the disastrous effects of the "great plow-up" from the teens and 20's that instigated the drought of the 30's. The story's spine is GK Farms, a wheat farming operation that began in 1933 as the farm land in western Kansas began to blow away. Apparently, the screenwriters based this film on a huge trove of correspondence, an incredible resource comprising over 10,000 documents.

Kriss uses extensive re-enacted footage that helps tell the story to better understand how the farmers tried, failed, and learned, in their pursuit to hang onto the American Dream. It's a story of tenacity and overcoming.

The starkness of the time is captured in footage that is largely rendered in black and white, and the sweep and personality of the time is captured incredibly well in Rob Pottorf's score.

Worth seeing more than once.

A Review of Harvesting the High Plains

[mclark-537-239820 · 8/10 · 25 November 2012]

Quiet fields of wheat, corn, Milo, dust and cattle are what the casual observer of the Western Kansas landscape might notice. The real story of life in this part of the country must be considered on a much greater scale and on a longer time line than a trip down Interstate 70 can afford. That is what comes across in the recent documentary, Harvesting The High Plains, from Director and Cinematographer Jay Kriss and his partner Sydney Duvall.

When I was asked to attend the premier of this film, I had some expectations. There are some images that come up when you say the words dust bowl and documentary such as Time/Life photos of dirty children and tired faces. You would expect the story of a hard time in a harsh climate. That is only some of what you get with Harvesting the High Plains. There is quite a bit of stock footage in the film, but those images are not the ones you would expect to see and they are skillfully blended with new black and white footage shot in and around Colby, Kansas and in fields in Southern Nebraska. At the start of the film I was looking for what was new and what was old, but I stopped trying about two minutes after it began as the story drew me in.

This is not just a Dustbowl story, but also a conversation between two men that were determined to make their farming operation a success despite the conditions. Ray Garvey and John Kriss wrote thousands of letters to each other over the years. Those letters have survived and are the meat of this story. With the compelling mix of voice actors reading the actual letters and the wonderful narration of Mike Rowe, we get to listen in on a conversation from decades past that sounds surprisingly like what you might here from area farmers who are right now dealing with one of the driest years in recent memory.

I live in Colby, Ks, but I did not grow up here and do not have an agricultural background. What I do have is a deep appreciation of filmmaking and storytelling. There is more of a cinematic quality to Harvesting than to many documentaries that I have seen. There are the obligatory interviews with experts and farmers, who remember what the conditions were like in the 1930s, but these only help us to understand the determination and the will of the people involved and serve to drive the story along.

If I were to give any criticism of this project, it would be that the film should be longer. There are decades of information that are packed into a short one-hour format that was imposed upon the filmmakers in order to fit the broadcasting schedule for Kansas Public Television. With a little more space to absorb the wealth of information included, Harvesting would be an even more enjoyable viewing experience. As it is, it is very much worth seeing.

Subjective look at Jay Kriss Dust Bowl Documentary

[frogratty · 10/10 · 3 October 2015]

I can add little to the thorough descriptive content of previously written reviews, so I focus on the subjective aspects that make this film far richer than the average documentary. In contrast to many movies I have seen lately – big budget, big name, Hollywood efforts – minutes flashed by like seconds, as I became completely engaged in the story-telling. Perfectly placed modern cinematography is seamlessly blended with evocative historical footage to further the narrative. Interviews and voice-overs are engaging, full of character. Most importantly, this history of one farm is rich in contrasts, rather than the dreary one-note song of other dust bowl stories.

The correspondence between farm manager Kriss and land owner Garvey is the most powerful device of the film. The two men's struggle to profit from "big farming" began at the onset of a staggering eight- year drought, inflicting failure after crop failure. By the end of their journey, they had a golden mountain of grain worth a million dollars. Throughout, their words to each other are filled with respect, candor, and fascinating technical details of the work of farming. In the current climate of childish, hateful, divisive language, from the discourse between top levels of government to the daily e-mails between co-workers, this exchange is simply endearing.