The decriminalisation of the recreational use of cannabis in the state of California in late 2016 had a seismic impact on an hitherto underground market.
As such, the film has a kinship with Fresh, Ana Sofia Joanes’s account of small operators attempting to pursue sustainable agriculture, with Robert Kenner’s Academy Award-nominated Food, Inc, which cast a critical eye over agri-industrial practises, and perhaps most of all with Mondovino, Jonathan Nossiter’s exploration of the impact of globalisation on independent wine producers.
While the very likeable veteran farmers the Bud Sisters tick some of the expected stoner boxes, Sue Taylor, a soigne retired Catholic school principal turned cannabis educator and advocate, is more at home in a business suit than she is sporting dreamcatcher earrings.
Falling between the two camps is the dynamic wife, mother and second-generation cannabis grower Chiah Rodriques, who sets up a collective of local farmers in Mendocino County, California, with the intention of promoting their produce as ‘artisanal’ and selling to the same provenance-obsessed consumers who habitually shop at Whole Foods.
It soon becomes clear that decriminalisation has had the result of flooding the market, pushing the prices down and making an already precarious living almost untenable for some.
There are issues: a prescriptive, hand-holding score overstates the emotional beats, and the film does have a tendency to repeat itself at times.
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