Santa Monica Filmmaker Examines Detroit’s Urban Farming Renaissance

By Michael Aushenker
Special to The Lookout

June 7, 2011 – Sure, the world is rife with problems of global consequence, yet for documentarian Leila Conners, it’s not all doom and gloom.

“All these crises are leading to opportunities,” she told the Lookout News.

Case in point: Detroit, Michigan.

When the automaking industry dried up in the last decade and people abandoned wholesale areas of what was once a teeming metropolis, something new and unexpected arose among the citizens who remained.

Detroit's city farming movement is documented in Conners’ latest film, “Urban Roots,” produced under her Tree Media banner.

Conners, a Santa Monica resident of some 15 years, co-directed the 2007 environmental film, “The 11th Hour,” with her sister, Nadia Conners. That documentary was produced by its narrator, the actor and environmentally impassioned activist Leonardo Di Caprio.

This year, Conners produced “Urban Roots” with her partner, Mathew Schmid.

Directed by Mark MacInnis, “Urban Roots” chronicles the people of Detroit’s attempt to be self-sufficient via an urban farming phenomenon that sprang up after the city's industrial communities went barren.

“A neighborhood can be empty,” she said. “Farming it, it’s mind-blowing. [‘Urban Roots’] shows what people are doing in a post-industrial world when the manufacturing goes away and there’s no job and you don’t have fresh food. What do you do?”

The process in which food is “grown far away from where you are, flown in and trucked in, it doesn’t work well anymore,” said Conners. “When you have something like what happened in Detroit” and the link between transportation of food and outlets has been broken, “urban farming is a response to that,” she said.

Several years ago, McInnis, a Detroit native, showed Conners raw footage of what eventually became their film. Conners said it was eye opening.

“Being from Santa Monica, you don’t really understand what’s going on in Detroit,” she said.

But, she added, urban farming is nothing new.

“People have been growing food in their backyards forever,” Conners said. “It’s almost like, in the last 50 years, we have forgotten about it with the advent of the industrial food system.”

So where does that leave Santa Monica?

“We don’t have the same problem right now,” Conners said. “We don’t have a collapsing town.”

However, Santa Monica’s creativity and progressive spirit would be make it the perfect place to put some of the lessons of urban farming into practice, she said.

Conners believes that the sense of self-reliance, communal collaboration, and health-consciousness depicted in “Urban Roots” could point toward a more sustainable Santa Monica, where she lives with Schmid and her sons Aidan Michael and Francis Sky.

“Why does every Santa Monican have a lawn mower,” Conners asked. “Why not have a lawn mower for every block?

“Already, the City of Santa Monica has a program that matches gardens...They try to link up people with yards who want to farm.

“You bring your community together because you share your food. You make more than you need, she said.

“I know a farmer [in Los Angeles] who is pretty much 90 per cent self-sufficient in the summer,” she continued. “It’s not like we’re saying we don’t like grocery stores. It’s that part of a vibrant urban life is to include gardening, rather than flying in garlic that came in from China.”

Tree Media is a production company with an environmental bent, and Conners takes pride from producing documentary films – “making a living improving the world” – as opposed to fictional narratives.

“I feel the need to get certain concepts out there,” Conners said. “These are well suited to documentaries. What’s nice about them is that they help people. They see the world around them.

“You may not make hundreds of millions of dollars but that’s okay,” she said. “That’s not necessarily the goal here.”

Next up for Tree Media, Conners is directing “Into Eden,” a documentary “taking the environmental crisis and taking a deep look inside human existence. We’ve actually started this project before ‘Urban Roots’ so it’s been quite a journey.”

Conners said she opted of widespread distribution for her latest film.

“I did not want to do the larger route,” she said. “We wanted the freedom to do it the way we wanted to.

“We were at the Laemmle theaters,” she said. “We’ve had a very small theatrical appearance. We’re going to do various events, school screenings. People can get the DVD and online.”

Conners is heartened by the reaction “Urban Roots” has received.

“We’re already getting screening requests from around the country,” she said. “People want to get their own gardens going.”

The trailer for “Urban Roots” can be viewed at http://urbanrootsamerica.com. Visit TreeMedia.com.