“40 Acres” director and co-writer R.T. Thorne said his film, which centers on a Black family’s survival through a starved, post-apocalyptic world and their commitment to preserving their heritage, also serves as a reminder to communities of color that knowing your history is crucial, particularly amid political anti-DEI agendas.
“It’s something that’s been instilled in me from my mother. One of the things she used to tell us all the time is that, ‘I don’t trust these institutions to teach you about you,’ so we have to learn our own history, and that’s been a big part of my journey,” Thorne told TheWrap. “I think the film is informed by history. It’s a film that takes place in the future, and I think that it’s a circular thing … In order to move forward, in order to survive, in order to thrive in the future, we have to understand our history.”
In Thorne’s feature directorial debut, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024, Danielle Deadwyler stars as the matriarch of the Freeman family, Hailey Freeman, a disciplined and military-trained mother whose only mission is to protect her family and their 40 acres of farmland after a fungal pandemic decimated 98% of the animal biosphere, a second civil war crippled the global food chain and an everlasting famine hit the world.
She and her family, which now includes her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) and his daughter Raine (Leenah Robinson), whom both are members of an Indigenous community, are the last descendants of generational African American farmers who settled in Canada after a war. In the famine-decimated future, the Freeman family lives a decent life, though they face the occasional invader. In their downtime, they learn their traditions and are instructed to complete book reports to ensure they retain critical knowledge.
And when a swarm of vicious, cannibalistic raiders sets their sights on the Freemans’ farm, the family will have to rely on their training to clear them out.
On the backdrop of the action-thriller is a slew of themes, including Black generational trauma Black mothers/women have carried, and a coming-of-age story that seeks to redefine Black masculinity through the meet-cute love story of Emmanuel “Mannie” Freeman (Kataem O’Connor) and trespasser Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas). But ultimately, as Thorne notes, “40 Acres” “proclaims the importance of Black and Indigenous sovereignty in a world that often seeks to erase them.”
In the midst of President Donald Trump’s campaign against DEI and his efforts to remove non-white history, Deadwyler said these struggles are nothing new for melanated folks.
“Michael Greyeyes told me, ‘Black and Indigenous people have always been living through apocalyptic times,’” Deadwyler said, adding that film often serves as an art form that can be used to challenge the status quo. “That’s the origin of cinema making, right? But also, making things that put forth our identities and our experiences is critical. This is what the art is for, to challenge these times … And to know that and to counter that, always, is kind of a part of identity-making and family-making; continuously building factions that are cross-culturally connecting and countering any kind of bulls–t narrative that may be coming out in the real world.”
Even the film’s title pays homage to the “40 acres and a mule” promise Union General William Tecumseh Sherman made to enslaved Black people on Jan. 6, 1865, as part of his Special Field Order No. 15. The promise, which was supported by the federal government, was reversed during the Reconstruction Era and ultimately hindered the Black community’s path for economic growth in the U.S.
“As a resilient community, the Black community has had to depend on our own cultural resilience, because not only they trying to erase our history now, but they’ve tried to erase our history before,” Thorne said. “They took away many of our languages before and they tried to force us to live like them. And through all of the hardships that Black people have had, we’ve relied on our own cultural heritage, our own cultural teachings, and that comes through in the film.”
Ultimately, the filmmaker said the movie highlights how the Black community’s knowledge of self, tradition and its unique culture continues to serve as their tools for survival.
“You see history as a big component — our art, our music, our dance — these are things that we rely on. Our food practices, our agricultural practices and our sense of faith — all of these things are things we’ve preserved our cultural identity through all these years of attempted erasure,” Thorne explained. “So it was important for all of those elements to be part of how this family survives. They not only survive because they have military might, but they survive because they know who they are, and they preserve those through the practices they have.”
“40 Acres” is now playing in theaters.
