Rebecca Richman Cohen is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker who teaches courses on media theory and advocacy at Harvard Law School. Her film Weed & Wine is now available on VOD, and she is now crowdfunding a sequel on Kickstarter. Through her work, she has examined a range of topics, including the prosecution of war crimes in Sierra Leone, responses to sexual violence in the US, cannabis legalization, and biodynamic winemaking. Her most recent film, The Recall: Reframed (broadcast on MSNBC) is the first in a trilogy of short films about mass incarceration, sexual violence, and racial justice. Her SXSW and Tribeca-award winning documentaries have been hosted on platforms including HBO, Amazon, Netflix, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera, public television, and more. She has taught at RISD, American University’s Human Rights Institute, and Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, and has held fellowships with Open Society Foundations, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard’s Film Study Center, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her very good dog and some nice humans too.
People say having a baby robs you of time. Where there were once endless stretches of freedom, now your time belongs entirely to your hapless infant. Whole days vanish into the bottomless well of blurry midnight feedings, long walks going nowhere, a parade of monotony interrupted by sparkling, impossible miracles. Time becomes somehow both elastic and slippery, “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” taking on a fearsome literalness: you could just as easily miss a milestone as you could an entire month, somewhere in the depths of potty training.
But having a kid gifts you time, too, in the sense that in becoming cellularly aware of it, you get to experience it in a new, impossible way. That’s what happened when I gave birth to my first child in 2020, mere weeks after wrapping my documentary feature, Weed & Wine. (My child is thanked in the credits as TBD Richman Cohen!) If I used to track time as how long a scene would take to edit, now I track it in minutes between naps, how long it has been since she pooped, the first time she smiled.
Time was doing strange things outside my apartment walls, too: we shot Weed & Wine largely in 2017 and were ready to release the film in the spring of 2020 when the pandemic hit. Our film reps pulled the film from HotDocs. The film screened at Deauville in France, but due to travel restrictions (and a baby), I couldn’t go. The first time I saw the film in a theater with an audience was last month, two days before our digital release. All those years I had spent working on the film collapsed, and we waited, suspended, for something to happen.
When I finally got back to work on the film – emerging from early motherhood just as everyone else was emerging from isolation – I realized something vital. I thought I had made a film about two farming families and the two industries on which they’d hung their livelihoods, one growing craft cannabis in Humboldt County, California, the other producing renowned, biodynamic wines in the south of France.
Turns out, I’d made a film about something else entirely. I’d made a film about time.
This is true in a literal sense, since both families – Kev and Cona Jodrey in California and the Thibons in France – are bound by the rhythms and seasonality of their lands and their crops. Both families, too, have time on a grander scale on their minds, as they’re both considering passing along their legacies and operation of their farms to the next generation.
And as I continued to hone the film and gear up for a wider release, I watched time run roughshod over the families, moving them away from the ephemeral, hopeful moment we managed to capture on film. In 2016, California was on the cusp of legalizing weed. What was meant to clarify the industry ended up decimating it: when we filmed, there were 30,000 farms in Humboldt. Now, there are fewer than 300. Kev and Cona shuttered their nursery and stopped growing on their farm for some years.
Meanwhile, in the Rhone Valley, climate change has ravaged the landscape. The Thibon family has ignored convention and planted Greek and Portuguese drought-resistant grapes – an affront to some vine traditionalists who expect the region’s classic grenache, syrah and mourvedre, and a challenge to the Thibons as they work out how to adapt their product.
Still, these families remain incredibly resilient. Their love for each other and the land endures. We’ve had to be resilient, too, since independent filmmaking has become even more difficult, with far less funding available, far more hurdles and far fewer distribution outlets.
Seeing the film through this new lens, I realized something fundamental: I wanted to go back. Back to these families, back to these places. I wanted the film not to be a static thing, immortalizing one moment in time, but rather the start of something, a decades-long project. Because I have come to love these people, yes, not to mention the beautiful agricultural products they produce, but more because that is the greatest single thing that film can do: capture change over time.
As filmmakers, we become architects of time. In an arrogant sense, we play God: we speed time up or slow it down, make one moment seem endless, collapse years into a single frame. In some ways, it’s a lie and distortion, but it also manages to capture what is true and human about time – how deeply we live inside it, are subject to it, and yet somehow, magically, believe that if we try hard enough, we can stop it, drag it out, speed it up, make more of it.
It’s why I take endless videos of my kid, now a maniacal four-year-old, along with – surprise twist! – my two new bonus kids, thanks to a new partner, the kind of beautiful, unexpected change only time can provide. I try to freeze them in time so I can remember all of it, even as it slips away. I want to capture how much my life has changed, and how much theirs are changing, too. And it’s why I’m going to keep chasing that feeling, into the next installment of Weed & Wine, and hopefully beyond.
The French vinter, Helene, says in the film that we are bathed in uncertainty. This is true, of course, for all farmers. And all indie filmmakers. And anyone who is a parent or a child or really just a human. I hope Weed & Wine and our journey to continue filming helps us all understand that beautiful and often agonizing bath as it unfolds over … time.
Featured image shows Hélène Thibon in Weed & Wine (left) and Rebecca Richman Cohen with her first child. All images courtesy Rebecca Richman Cohen.
