Product Description

HYBRID is a documentary about Milford Beeghly, a radical farmer in the 1930's who pioneered the process of genetically enhanced crops - considered a madman, this documentary is an astonishing portrait of one man's obsessive vision with plants. The film balances the science of farming with the sad neglect of Milford's family. The director uses actual 16 mm footage from the 1930's, animated sequences and interview footage with Milford himself (who is larger than life) from his final years.

Review

The publicity for the multi-award-winning "Hybrid," describes it as "one interesting documentary," and, as it turns out, that's not an overstatement. More specifically, it's an arty, black-and-white collage of a documentary mixing interviews, old television commercials, family photos, impressionistic landscapes and Quay Brothers-style stop-action animation to tell the story of an Iowa farmer named Milford Beeghly. The guy seems to have stepped right out of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" -- an austere, uncommunicative figure so obsessed with his personal quest of developing a new strain of hybrid corn that he ignores everything else, including his family's emotional needs. In the course of his film, director Monteith McCollum builds some interest in the arc of Beeghly's long life and gets some campy laughs out of the man's fascination with the wondrous ways of corn, and even communicates some sympathy for the old boy as he reaches his 100th birthday and finally begins to mellow out. --William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Run do not walk to a movie about corn. Yep that s right. Playful, disturbing, dazzling and overwhelming... Staggeringly original. A rare kind of filmmaking. --Dallas Observer

Wild. Take to the skies on the wings of a crop duster, go beneath the earth to witness a seed germinating, amazing. It s David Lynch goes to Iowa! --Minneapolis Star-Tribune