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REEL SOUTH
Cash Crop
Season 9
Episode 906
In Southern Virginia, Black farmers like Cecil Shell balance their interests in honoring their tradition of tobacco farming against the onset of solar energy farms exploding across the region. Through Cecil, the film explores one rural county’s shifting economic interests and his own efforts to steward the community, including Black landowners, through changing times.
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21:10
In 1971, one of the worst industrial tragedies in U.S. history shook rural Georgia.

14:26
Jared Dawson embodies his drag persona, Lavonia Elberton, in Atlanta, Georgia.

17:18
An ode to one man’s fight against strip mining the Appalachian mountains he loved dearly.

30:26
A Southern restaurant adjusts to newfound fame after appearing on Korean television.

24:04
Two Korean-American adoptees meet their birth mothers for the first time.

27:09
An Alabama inmate fights to keep a jailhouse romance alive while advocating for parole.

27:32
Youth suicide at a Louisiana juvenile detention center exposes a legacy of abuse.

56:15
An ode to the poetry and power of the American South’s diverse landscape and its stewards.

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55:46
Louis Armstrong was an icon, but for Sharon, he was the father she could never reveal.

56:04
One man standing in the way of a petrochemical plant expansion refuses to give up.