Star-studded film to premiere with dinner and a movie during Freep Film Festival

As the husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Josh and Rebecca Tickell reviewed feedback on their hit documentary “Kiss the Ground,” one crowd reaction was consistent.

“Audiences wanted the story to continue,” Josh Tickell said. “They just wanted more.”

The 2020 film, narrated by Woody Harrelson and featuring interviews with Gisele Bündchen, Tom Brady and Patricia Arquette, explores the value of earth’s soil and its impact on climate change and various environmental phenomena.

“We started ‘Kiss the Ground’ 10 years ago and all of the issues that we talk about have gotten worse,” Josh Tickell said, citing chronic health issues, diet-related illnesses, climate change, carbon emissions and the rise of farmer suicides among concerns at the forefront. “We thought a second film on the issue was necessary and we knew that it was going to have to be harder hitting,” he said.

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So, the award-winning documentarians who have dedicated their craft to producing films with a throughline of environmental activism, set out to give the people what they wanted. With “Common Ground,” the Tickells have continued the conversation on the importance of healthy soil by way of regenerative agriculture, a practice that aims to restore life to degraded soil through various methods.

“We wanted to do more investigation into a diverse array of groups who are doing regenerative agriculture in ‘Kiss the Ground,’ and what we learned is, regenerative agriculture is very much an Indigenous issue and has been for thousands of years,” Josh said. “By the time we got to ‘Common Ground,’ we were able to work with a whole new network of people that were able to show us some of these Indigenous agricultural principles, which are just amazing.”

In “Common Ground,” which premieres during the Detroit Film Festival April 12, the Tickells feature interviews with Lyla June Johnston, an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer on Native traditions, as well as with large and small-scale farmers like Leah Penniman, the James Beard Award-winning co-founder of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York.

“The other thing that we really got from audience feedback is, they wanted a broad array of solutions, from super small-scale — like almost backyard — all the way up to massive farms. They wanted to see that (regenerative farming) could be done on millions of acres, which we show in Mexico and Colorado.”

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In addition to more diverse voices and perspectives on regenerative agriculture, the Tickells upped the Hollywood star power in “Common Ground,” welcoming back Woody Harrelson for narration, along with an ensemble of celebs. This time, Rosario Dawson, Laura Dern, Donald Glover, Jason Momoa and Ian Somerhalder lend their voices to the film.

“The artists really got in their bones,” Josh Tickell said of the celebrity voiceovers. “They've all become very passionate about the film and they’ve gone out on their social media to promote it, so it really helps to have that advocacy group. It helps to have Rosario out there promoting it and Jason promoting it to millions of people that wouldn't otherwise know about the subject.”

During the Freep Film Festival screening of “Common Ground,” the documentary will be paired with a four-course dinner at the experiential culinary venue Frame in Hazel Park. Guests are invited to enjoy a tasting menu of wood-fired dishes prepared by Frame chef Joseph VanWagner.

The menu infuses dishes with farm-fresh ingredients, such as pickled wild morels with confit pork belly and pierogi filled with fiddlehead ferns and rabbit sausage. For dessert, fresh thyme offers an herbaceous note to housemade gelato.

The Freep Film Festival dinner-and-a-movie event will begin at 5:30 p.m., April 12 with tickets running $95 per person. There’s an option to beginning with your meal or the screening — the choice is yours.

And on Earth Day, April 22, a special one-day screening of “Common Ground” will hit a limited number of AMC Theatres across the country, including in metro Detroit. This version of the film will feature never-before-seen scenes as well as pre-recorded Q&A sessions with the filmmakers and co-stars.

For showtimes of “Common Ground: Earth Day 2024,” visit commongroundfilm.org.

More on the film fest at freepfilmfestival.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Star-studded film ‘Common Ground’ to premiere during Freep Film Fest