One Good Year

Need just one good year?  Mikal Jakubal and his subjects do.  Jakubal is making a documentary following the lives of several Emerald Triangle growers and what happens to them in the course of a year. Today’s Time Standard features a story on his film. Here is an excerpt—

Five young trimmers sit out on the deck, surrounded by buds, sunlight and the open air of Southern Humboldt.

The scene is set nicely for local filmmaker Mikal Jakubal, who is intent on capturing a slice of life within Humboldt County’s marijuana industry.

One trimmer, a seasoned hand who has a sunny disposition and no shoes on, talks as her fingers nimbly pluck buds and trim them with Fiskars, a brand of scissors.

She said she isn’t a pot smoker and had no position on the recently failed Proposition 19 — which aimed to legalize and regulate pot for recreational use — but she thinks the work is fun.

”We get to hang out in the sun, listen to rad music and hang out with cool people,” she said, with the camera rolling.

Jakubal said the trimmer — who does not live in California but travels to Humboldt for seasonal work — is a part of an industry spawned in Humboldt, just as much as the small pot farmers eking out a living or the big growers who are making plenty of money.

The story he hopes to tell with a documentary he has worked on since March is the underlying culture that attracted many of the older growers in the first place — going back to the land.

”It’s not about dope growing. It’s about what Southern Humboldt is about,” Jakubal said. “You can’t talk about it without talking about weed.”

Jakubal also has an excellent blog in which he chronicles often hysterically funny tales about life in a pot growing area. The posts are full of info about life in these here hills.  I keep his blog on my reader to check every day.