Arts Listings

In the wake of the 1992 riots in South Central Los Angeles, the city sought to mitigate the damage to the social fabric with a series of community projects. One project was a community garden on a dormant plot of land.  

What developed was a 14-acre oasis in the midst of a blighted urban landscape, the largest community garden in the nation, sustaining more than 350 families, most of them Latino. The garden flourished for nearly a decade, until the city notified the gardeners in 2003 that in two months they would be evicted and the garden destroyed to make way for warehouses and a soccer field.  

Berkeley native Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s documentary, The Garden, traces the tale of the farmers’ attempt to retain their oasis. The film opens Friday, May 1 at Rialto’s Elmwood Theater on College Avenue and at the Lumiere Theater in San Francisco.  

The city had orginally acquired the land from owner Ralph Horowitz through eminent domain, paying him $5 million. In 2003 the farmers discovered that the Los Angeles City Council, in a secret, closed-session meeting, had sold the land back to Horowitz for $5 million—a price far below market value. 

Horowitz announced his intention to build warehouses on the land, as well as a soccer field.  

The soccer field was a pet project of Concerned Citizens of South Central L.A., a group that had previously spent several years and millions of dollars to develop another soccer field. Promised a grass field with seating for 800 spectators, the community was ultimately left with little more than a dusty lot with two lonely goals and shaky lines etched in white chalk.  

Though many of the questions behind the battle over the garden remain unanswered, and the nature of the corruption at play unexplained, the film touches on a host of issues, from racism to development to corruption to what one farmer refers to as “poverty pimping.” 

In the end, the district’s city councilmember still manages to get re-elected, as does the mayor; the head of Concerned Citizens of South Central L.A. dies of a stroke; a few of the gardeners accept compensation in the form of a smaller, less desirable plot of land beneath power lines; others lay down roots in Bakersfield; and Horowitz never constructs any warehouses or a soccer field, the lot remaining a fence-off, dusty expanse in the middle of an urban neighborhood. 

Scott Hamilton Kennedy credits “quite a bit of Berkeley spirit” for giving him “the confidence to talk to all the players in a story like The Garden,” recalling “all the wonderful types of people you meet in Berkeley— rich, poor, homeless, politicians—they’re all people, and I was taught to treat people with respect, as individuals. There aren’t too many situations where I feel out of place.” 

Kennedy cut his teeth in documentary filmmaking “the first summer after college, making a documentary on Long Island, then cutting it in New York City” with his mentor and friend, the late filmmaker and teacher Richard P. Rogers, to whom Kennedy dedicated The Garden. “Then I got away from doing documentaries for a long time, making music videos instead. With the digital revolution, I had the chance to make my own movies without having to raise money, without waiting for someone else to say, ‘Go ahead.’” 

The compactness of digital filmmaking makes a difference, too. “Many, many days it was just me and my camera with the microphone on top. You can’t underestimate how far that intimacy, that amateur quality, gets you with people: they think, ‘I can talk with this guy!’”  

Kennedy’s friend and co-producer Domenique Derringer saw “a piece on TV that led us to do The Garden. We knew there was a lot of good story there. From the start, we chose to tell it through the farmers’ eyes, their point of view, as information was hidden from them. There were backroom deals. The farmers kept digging for answers; some questions have never been answered. 

“Most [of the farmers] were Latino in origin, with a history of farming in their families—and most had not done much political work before. They ended up training themselves to become political. It was an exciting thing to see, the little democracy growing up among the farmers. And that meant infighting, too!” 

Kennedy related that to what he had experienced growing up in Berkeley. “Somebody said once, ‘The Perfect is enemy to the Good.’ I love the freedom of everything in Berkeley. But at the end of the day, when everybody’s fighting, everybody’s feeling everybody else is screwing them over, there’s a bigger thing than our own small squabbles. Making The Garden, we had to ask sometimes, why couldn’t it be a soccer field and a community garden too? It’s a film about the political process, about trying to communicate without getting derailed by ego, race, class ... to do what’s best, treat each other fairly. 

“I’m proud of my Berkeley roots,” Kennedy affirmed. “It’s a sensibility that got into my DNA, growing up in Berkeley—and came out in the film.”