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.
Peter and the Farm
An unsettling portrait of an eccentric Vermont farmer (Netflix)
Heathen Films
Alissa Wilkinson covered film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.
”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
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