Although the above film clip is specifically about Biodynamic farming, the 3 hour documentary it’s part of, is about the life and work of Rudolf Steiner. Biodynamics is the method of farming which Ontario raw milk farmer Michael Schmidt uses. And although Rudolf Steiner never specifically advocated raw milk, pasteurizing milk had not been developed back in the early 1920s when Steiner gave his “Agriculture Course”, a series of lectures from which present day biodynamic farming practices have evolved. Of course not all biodynamic dairy farmers are involved in raw milk.
It’s a daunting challenge to present Steiner’s work to a general audience, one that has never been so successfully attempted on film. The occasion for this film was the 150th anniversary of Steiner’s birth. Rudolf Steiner’s work, as detailed in the film, encompasses education, architecture, medicine, farming, and care of the mentally handicapped, to name but a few fields.
Filmmaker Jonathan Stedall is formerly of the BBC, where he worked on projects with Laurens van der Post, documenting the life and culture of South Africa’s Bushmen tribe. Van der Post wrote many books about the Bushmen and their culture, and about his WWII experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese.
The clip below is a trailer for the film as a whole:
