A film about water, land, and a way of life
A film by BEN KNIGHT Produced by PALMER LAND CONSERVANCY
Palmer Land Conservancy proudly presents a groundbreaking documentary by the acclaimed director, Ben Knight.
Water is a finite resource — and an essential one. For farmers, it’s everything.
In this poignant new film, award-winning filmmaker Ben Knight challenges us to think about land and water use in the West through an intimate portrait of a rural farming community in Pueblo, Colorado, as they fight to protect their water and land, and in turn, their culture and livelihood.
PRODUCED BY
“This land should be like our only child. We should be protecting it with everything we have.”
— Mike Bartolo
ABOUT THE FILM
MIRASOL, Looking at the Sun delves into the lives of multi-generational Italian and Hispanic families in a rural Colorado farming community – from a 92-year old farmer to the young people poised to inherit the land. Through their voices, the film explores their fight to safeguard a way of life that hangs in a delicate balance in the face of rapid development, water scarcity, and population growth.
MIRASOL is a humble, but powerful rallying cry that helps us understand what it would mean to lose connection to what sustains us. “This land should be like our only child,” says one farmer. “We should be protecting it with everything we have.”
The film is an invitation to stand up for all of the hardworking families and their thriving fields on the fringes of cities across the country that are so often overlooked, or taken for granted. As a community, and as a nation, we have important choices to make that will define our future.
MIRASOL is a catalyst for meaningful change — one where citizens can mobilize to protect land and water for the well-being of nature and people. It is up to us to write the ending of the MIRASOL story with our actions today. Because to love a place is merely the beginning. It will take courage and collective will to protect it.
A statement from director, ben knight
“MIRASOL has been a dream project for me. It gave me the opportunity to intimately engage with my Colorado neighbors, and the Arkansas River watershed, in a special way. The more time I spent out in the fields, family kitchens and digging into archives — the more I started to realize how incredibly vulnerable and precious this sliver of irrigated mesa is. Before long it became my mission to tell a story that's all too common in agriculture: We are taking these places and these people for granted. My hope with MIRASOL was to simply help remind folks how fragile it all is.”
Ben Knight was first inspired to make documentaries as a young man working behind the projector at Telluride Mountainfilm. Since then, he has become widely acclaimed for his adventure and environmental filmmaking. His films include the feature length documentary DamNation (premiered at SXSW 2014 and produced in conjunction with Patagonia), The Last Honey Hunter (Mountainfilm 2018; National Geographic), Learning to Drown (Tribeca 2021; The North Face) -- and a myriad of films that masterfully intertwine raw human stories with the grandeur of the natural world.
The time is now to take action to protect local food, water and farmland in Pueblo and beyond — before it’s lost forever.