A languid, loving portrait of Black farmers in the South, “Seeds” is a mixture of celebration and lament. Family farming has been endangered, but for African American farmers, the land — holding onto it, cultivating it — is even more precarious and precious. Considering recent, breakneck attempts to gut civil rights, director Brittany Shyne’s debut feature — which won the U.S. documentary prize at the Sundance Film Festival — feels elegiac.

A requiem is not the filmmaker’s intention, however. With the patience of a sower, Shyne lets the lives of her subjects unfold gently over two hours. She filmed for nine years, following farm families as they went about their hardscrabble labor, as well as the work of community. Although there are urgent economic and political challenges facing these families, this isn’t muckraking cinema. Instead, the filmmaker hews to the quotidian, the weekly, the annual. Shot in black and white,...