A film about water, land, and a way of life
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 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.
Watch the Trailer
"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.
Watch the Full Film
37 Minutes | Available with closed captions and Spanish subtitles.
Enjoy brief follow-up at the End of the Film
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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.
Film Partners & Event Sponsors
Nationally we’re losing 2,000 acres of land—each day.
MIRASOL challenges us to consider what’s at stake and whether we are willing to take action to protect it.
Three Ways to Protect Local Farmland
1. Buy
Buy local food direct from farmers, ranchers, and purveyors from Palmer’s Local Food Guide.
2. Give
Make a donation to Palmer Land Conservancy to join the urgent movement to conserve land and water resources.
About Palmer Land Conservancy
Palmer Land Conservancy believes there is nothing more powerful than storytelling and film when it comes to opening people’s eyes and hearts to an issue. MIRASOL challenges us to protect agricultural communities, the lifeblood of our local food system, and stand up for all the hardworking families and thriving fields on the fringes of cities that are so often taken for granted. Palmer produced MIRASOL to unite people and to bridge the divide between rural and urban life. From the beginning, the goal of the MIRASOL is to ignite a culture shift for conservation and to amplify Palmer’s conservation work on the frontlines of water and farmland conservation in Colorado. As a community, and as a nation, we have a choice to make.