Hawthorne Valley
Light Up the Night
Opening film + giving film
The ask
Hawthorne Valley Association is a Biodynamic farm, a Waldorf school, a creamery, a natural-foods store and a research programme, all held together by one idea — renewing soil, society and self. That breadth is the whole point and the whole difficulty: it resists a tidy summary, and it is easy to mistake one part for the whole. For a fundraising night, the people who fund the work needed to feel how the parts make one another possible.
What we did
We made the films to be watched together, in a room, on the night. Rather than walk through the association initiative by initiative, we let the place and its people carry it — the farm, the classroom, the creamery, the store — so the scale accumulates over a few minutes instead of arriving as a list. The hard part was what to leave out. And because a film that only works once is a waste, we shot and paced them for a live crowd and a big screen first, then rebuilt each for social afterwards.
The result
They did their job on the night — Light Up the Night was a strong fundraiser — and then they kept working. Hawthorne Valley now shares the pieces across all of its social channels and on its website, where they have become standing tools for explaining the association rather than one-off event films.
More from this project
Transcript — Light Up the Night
There is an expansiveness to the idea of a village. Often when we think of a village, we think very quickly of people, society. Culture. And what I love about Hawthorne Valley is it really presences the role of the plants, animals and not just the farm animals, but all the wildlife. Such an expansive view of what it means to be on a living planet.
The idea that you recognize that you can create a place where young and old alike are coming together, intermingling, working together, where we can become, in the true sense for human beings. It's really, really becoming. We're still on this journey. We haven't really figured it out. It's a lot of striving. It's a lot of research. It's a lot of trial and error.
It's towards an understanding of the future and future possibility. You know, I think if you look at human history, young people had roles to play in communities. You know, people my age had roles to play in communities, and elder people had roles playing communities. And that idea of having a role to play gives a person a sense of value in a sense of purpose. You know, that just kind of trickles out into how we care for the space around us, whether it's the the spaces that we construct to live and learn in all the spaces that we occupy that were here long before we were here, and that we'll be here long after we're here.
Hawthorne Valley School and the whole association is very much part of the medicine for what I think we are seeing as the disease and disorder of how it is that we're bringing our children up in this modern world. I feel like the founding impulse, let's meet the need of our times. Those needs haven't actually changed in many ways. They've gotten more intense and through being present to each other, through listening to each other, both here in our little microcosm and then in our broader web of relationships. What is this future possibility for our children, for their children?
For their grandchildren? This is my dream, my prayer.
Transcribed from the delivered film.