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Peter Dunning, who sports a beard and a crotchety, rugged individuality, lives and farms on 187 acres in Vermont. Peter and the Farm (which bears a passing resemblance to the podcast S-Town) follows Dunning through about a year of life, slowly revealing the complicated layers under his surface. You’d never call him polished, but there’s a lot going on behind Dunning’s exterior, and the filmmakers become implicated in his struggles as time goes on. On its face, the documentary is an homage to the beauty of a New England year, but its true resonance lies in what lurks beneath the apparently pastoral exterior: a universe in one farm, and one man.
”This intimate, unvarnished, and occasionally transcendent micro-portrait may seldom leave Dunning’s property, but it takes stock of the whole world.” David Ehrlich, Indiewire
Release date: November 4, 2016
Streaming on: Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Vudu, Google Play
Metacritic score: 80 out of 100