Michigan State University faculty and students are working on an hour-long documentary film tentatively titled Farmers, filming and Flint.

It will extend the half-hour award-winning film The Kings of Flint by adding the stories of several other urban farmers in the city.  The Kings of Flint features karate masters Jacky and Dora King of Beecher, an unincorporated community adjacent to Flint.  The Kings teach students martial arts and farming.

As this film is aired in PBS stations throughout the country and screened at film festivals, the documentary crew is training a handful of urban farmers in Flint to use mini HD video cameras.

The extended film will weave together footage from the farmers and MSU faculty and students to create an organically grown storyline about the challenges these farmers face as they try to grow food and raise chickens and other livestock in the city.

In late May, the film screened at the Student Sustainability Film Festival in Portland, Ore., where it shared “Best in Show” and a $1,000 prize with two other filmmaking groups. Check your local PBS program schedule, for The Kings of Flint.

Meanwhile, watch Great Lakes Echo for regular previews of material that will be used in the extended version.

This week: The Kings talk about their new solar project, their second greenhouse and their bid for a new fruit orchard.

Michael Hamm, an MSU professor of sustainable agriculture,  describes the university’s role in urban agriculture and calls Jacky and Dora’s farm one of two or three of the “most exciting” urban agriculture projects in the country.

Greening of Flint website

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