Agatha’s Almanac, directed by Canadian filmmaker Amalie Atkins, unfolds with a patience that feels almost unfamiliar – making it a natural moment to introduce both film and its creator. Shot in Canada over six years by an all-female crew on 16mm film, the documentary follows a 90-year-old Agatha Bock, who lives alone on her ancestral farm in Canada, tending heirloom seeds and sustaining a way of life shaped by seasonal cycles rather than modern convenience. The film resists explanatory narration, allowing Agatha’s daily rituals and the Land itself to guide its structure. Rather than moving toward a conventional narrative arc, Agatha’s Almanac settles into a rhythm shaped by repetition, attentiveness,  and ecological time. What emerges is not simply a portrait of a woman and her land, but a way of moving through the world that asks the viewer to slow down enough to notice. 

Much of Agatha’s Almanac is devoted to preparation. We watch rows being formed, seeds selected, tools arranged, water poured carefully along furrows. Atkins structures the film to follow the same arc as the garden itself: preparation, germination, growth, harvest, and finally hibernation. Husked seeds and still fields signal not an ending, but another form of readiness. By organizing itself around ecological time and by working with the material constraints of analogue filmmaking–using a wind-up Bolex and an Arriflex SR2 camera–the film foregrounds care as its central action. 

Agatha’s presence anchors everything. She knows her land intimately—where the boundaries stretch, which trees are beginning to fall. She can tell when a watermelon is ripe by the sound it makes, when plants are stressed by their texture, and when yield will be affected long before it shows. Her knowledge resides in her body, shaped by decades of close observation. 

The camera often lingers on her hands: plucking seeds gently into rows, pouring water down the soil, lifting berries one by one. “Then you wait for Mother Nature,” she says. Waiting here is not passive. It is an act of trust, built through repetition. Growth happens when it happens. The film understands this and never pushes for resolution. 

Agatha saves seeds year after year, including some passed down from her mother. She keeps plants from one season to the next, lowers cost through careful storage, and preserves lineage through habit. Her mother canned hundreds of jars well into old age. Gardening was not separate from life—it was the structure that held it together. These practices are shown plainly, without explanation, allowing their weight to speak for itself. 

Loss enters quietly. 

In one scene, the camera pans across empty lawn chairs nestled among low plants, then out into open landscape and sky. We learn that Agatha has watched her sisters and many friends die. There is no emphasis, no pause for sentiment—just the Land absorbing the absence. Agatha continues. “Do what you can and don’t worry about the rest,” she says. The line lands because it is lived, not declared.

Her days are full but simple. She eats homemade bread and radish sandwiches, keeps chocolate to four almonds, repairs shoes bought decades ago, fixes broken things first with masking tape, then duct tape—“very handy.” 

She lives without running water, washing her hair outside, collecting rainwater, and listening to birds. Resourcefulness here is not framed as hardship, but as sufficiency. She is proud of her work. She spends her mornings and evenings on the Land. She has never been lonely because she always had something to do. 

The film’s aesthetic choices reinforce this restraint. Shot on 16mm film over six years, the visible grain, long scenes, and minimal dialogue create a calm, immersive experience. Occasionally, unexpected music—layered over berry picking—interrupts the stillness, reminding us that this is not nostalgia, but living present. 

What makes Agatha’s Almanac stand out is its refusal to perform urgency or instruction. It does not tell the viewer how to live. It simply shows what care looks like when practiced consistently, over a lifetime. The result is a documentary that feels less like a statement and more like an invitation: to watch more closely, to move more slowly, and to recognize the soft intelligence in lives shaped by attention. 

“It’s a privilege to be alive,” Agatha says. 

The film leaves that sentence with us, trusting we will know what to do with it.