Sweet Land

Farming country in Minnesota, 1920. Inge arrives from Germany to marry a man she has never met. But the First World War has only just ended and the town is still hostile to Germans. The pastor refuses to perform the marriage and her papers turn out not to be in order. Inge stays on the farm of the man she was to marry, and the two of them, in a gap where they are neither married nor single and cannot speak to each other, begin working the land together. Ali Selim's first feature is adapted from a Will Weaver story, with Elizabeth Reaser as Inge. It is about immigration, about not having the language, and about when a place decides to accept a person. The field itself is very nearly a separate character.