By Angel Akurienne • Published February 24, 2026
On a cool morning in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, the sun is slow to arrive. A thin layer of fog, the kind that collects in bowls of farmland before lifting like a curtain, hangs above the herb rows at Tuo Vang’s Farm. Liz Tracy, bundled lightly against the kind of early-season chill that comes with the threat of frost, stands at the edge of the field holding stillness the way other directors might hold a camera.
Vang brushes frost from a narrow row of vegetation. Behind her, Tracy’s crew is still unloading equipment, discussing lenses, debating where to place the first frame. But Tracy doesn’t move. She watches the farmer’s hand, the slight hesitation, the way it hovers just long enough to register the stakes: a frost at the wrong moment can undo months of work.
Later, she tells me this is why she makes documentaries. “The best scenes happen before you’ve started filming,” she says, “Documentary is about noticing the thing nobody else is looking at.”
Documentary is about noticing the thing nobody else is looking at.
She says it quietly, a truth she’s learned across a career built not on spectacle but observation. At 19, standing in a National Geographic office, she had the same instinct: to wait, to listen, to watch people being themselves. It’s the instinct that’s guided her ever since.
Her latest project, Rooted: Stories from Minnesota’s Farming Future, a collaboration with The Great Northern and The Good Acre, takes her into the lives of farmers across Minnesota. Many of them immigrants, many of them farmers of color, many of them reinventing agricultural practices to keep pace with a changing climate.
For Tracy, Rooted is a meditation on the act of seeing: what it requires, what it reveals, and how that act itself has transformed in an era where everyone already knows how they look on camera.
The People Who Know They’re Being Watched
A decade ago, Tracy says, walking into someone’s home or worksite with a camera created a kind of gentle disorientation. Most people didn’t know how they appeared, literally or symbolically, through a lens. Their first instinct was to simply keep doing what they were doing. Not anymore.
“People aren’t observed in the same way now,” Tracy says. “It used to be mysterious when a film crew showed up. Now everyone is so aware, so practiced.”
She says this with a mix of fascination and loss. Not exactly nostalgia, but a kind of wistfulness for the early verité energy that came from filming people before they could anticipate their own performance. But she’s not alarmed by the shift. If anything, she sees it as a new terrain to explore. “Storytelling is much more collaborative now,” she explains. “People understand framing, pacing, tone. They know what imagery means. They know how it travels.” She pauses, then adds: “But I miss the slowness. The rhythm of old documentaries – the patience of them.”
In graduate school at The New School, she spent hours watching long, unhurried films by Frederick Wiseman, the Maisel brothers, and D.A. Pennebaker. She’s still moved by their quiet persistence – the way a camera could settle, almost meditatively, into the backdrop of someone’s life. “There’s a profound zone you enter when you watch something slow,” she says. “A deeper kind of seeing.” Rooted is, in many ways, her attempt to reclaim that space – to offer audiences the chance to sit inside moments long enough for their meaning to surface.
The Beauty of Controlled Chaos
Tracy is not an improviser by nature, but she has become one out of necessity. Or maybe devotion. “I like the field to be a little messy,” she says with a small, knowing smile. “Because that’s where the story is.”
She never arrives unprepared – her notebooks are meticulous, shot lists detailed, timelines carefully constructed. But she also recognizes that the moment reality meets planning, something else emerges: the truth of the scene. “You plan for one thing, and then someone is harvesting or mending or rushing because frost is coming,” she says. “You have to pivot. You have to let go.” Still, she resists the romantic idea that documentary is all intuition. If the field is the wild place, the edit bay is where she turns feral material into a narrative.
“Post-production demands discipline,” she says.“You get this mountain of footage – fourteen-hour days stacked endlessly – and you have to carve a story out of it.” She speaks about editing almost like sculpting, a slow revealing through shape. “Documentary will drown you if you don’t impose structure,” she adds. “But that structure has to serve what really happened, not what you wish had happened.”
Her process, she tells me, has been shaped by years of working across roles: camera, editing, associate producing. It taught her empathy for the hidden labor that holds productions together and humility for the chaos beneath any polished cut.
The Farmers Who Carry Knowledge Across Borders
Farmers are a little like artists. Each farm is an expression. Each one is a vision.
The Good Acre, the Twin Cities-based food hub where she volunteers, introduced Tracy to the farmers whose stories now anchor the film. Many arrived in Minnesota carrying agricultural knowledge from Laos, Kenya, Thailand, Central America, and East Africa. Others are third-generation Midwesterners reshaping their family land in response to climate change.
“Minnesota farmers are incredibly diverse,” Tracy says.“They’re bringing knowledge and practices shaped over generations.”
She describes Hmong farmers who grow medicinal herbs not found in grocery stores, and Kenyan farmers adapting indigenous practices to shorter, colder seasons. She talks about small-scale farmers navigating unpredictable frost lines, surviving on thin margins, and discovering new techniques as weather patterns shift under their feet.
“They’re not just growing food,” she says. “They’re inventing ways to survive climate volatility – in real time, every season.”Her admiration is not superficial. It borders on reverence. “Farmers are a little like artists,” she says. “Each farm is an expression. Each one is a vision.”
“Minnesota Could Feed Minnesota”
At one point, I mention a phrase I’d heard: “Minnesota could feed Minnesota.” She stops – a stillness that feels deliberate, like she’s letting the truth land.“I love that,” she says. “Minnesota doesn’t brag about itself. But it’s true – the state could be self-sustaining.”
It’s the kind of line that changes the way you look at the landscape – the fields, the distribution networks, the quiet competence of people growing food in a state many imagine as frozen half the year.
Tracy sees the potential everywhere. “When you meet these farmers,” she says, “when you see what they’re doing with so few resources – it shifts something in you.” You understand food differently.You understand the land differently.You understand Minnesota differently.
The Work of Paying Attention
Throughout our conversation, I get the sense that Tracy’s filmmaking is really just a structured practice of noticing – of looking deeply enough that meaning has nowhere to hide.
“You don’t go in as the authority,” she says.“You go in to learn.”
And that may be why Rooted feels, even in early stages, like a work that is both intimate and expansive. It isn’t trying to explain farming; it’s trying to reveal farmers. It’s trying to build a bridge between the people who grow the food and the people who eat it – which, she argues, is everyone.
Her work reminds you that documentary is not simply a form of storytelling, but a form of stewardship: of trust, of community, of memory.
When I think back to the story of Liz on the edge of that field – watching frost gather on herbs, watching a farmer decide whether an early cold snap will undo their week – it becomes clear that Tracy isn’t just capturing the world. She is witnessing it. She is honoring it. She is doing what great documentarians do: holding the quiet moments up to the light, and asking us to look with her.
“If you stay curious,” she says, “people will show you who they are. And that’s the real story.” And with Rooted she is ready to tell it.
Don’t miss the premiere of Rooted: Stories from Minnesota’s Farming Future on Thursday, March 26th at The Main Cinema.
This special screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Director and Producer Liz Tracy and Onesmus Mutio (a farmer featured in Rooted), moderated by Jothsna Harris (Founder, Change Narrative LLC). Join us for a post-screening reception with Chowgirls Catering and O’shaughnessy Distilling Co.
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