A documentary about gay farmers? Sounds interesting.
A new short documentary is making the rounds online because of its unique topic. A secret (though, not anymore) hotline for gay farmers.
In the United Kingdom, a man named Keith Ineson runs this hotline for gay farmers. Ineson, a former clergy member and child of a farming community, decided to create this hotline as a way to connect all of the gay farmers suffering from a lack of connection.
After hearing of Ineson and this hotline, filmmaker Matt Houghton decided to record the stories of Ineson and the other gay farmers for posterity. On top of interviewing several of these farmers, Houghton added reimagined depictions of their tales as a way to give the film an eery and mysterious atmosphere that matches the very existence of this secret hotline.
As for the farmers, they spoke of the horrors and struggles of being gay in rural Britsh lands.
“You want to scream out what the problem is, but you can’t,” one farmer says in the film. “I’ve got all these feelings of guilt from what I was doing, and feared that I would lose friends, family, my home—everything.”
“I grew up in a small rural village of West Wales,” a different farmer says. “There were rules about behavior that was tolerated. There was no such thing as a gay farmer.”
Talking to the Atlantic, Houghton notes how the film is greatly benefited by the honesty, openness, and generosity of farmers.
“I’ve done a lot of interviewing in my career,” he continued, “but I was often very surprised at how quickly the people I spoke to were willing to talk about some of their most intimate experiences. That was definitely not what I expected. I think a big part of it is that, in some cases, they’d very rarely had the chance to speak freely.”
If you want to watch the documentary that sprung out of that generosity and openness, you can watch it in its entirety down below.
Source: The Atlantic
