Shades of Indigo (Shades of Green)

Sher Singh Taliwal and other Sikh farmers in Whatcom County, Washington have built something remarkable: control of a significant share of the American berry industry. Across 130 acres of blueberries and 250 acres of raspberries, the Sikh farming community in this corner of the Pacific Northwest produces roughly 80% of all processed red raspberries in the United States. It's an agricultural achievement with roots that go back more than a century, when the first Sikh workers arrived and chose to stay despite being unwelcome.

The film doesn't look away from that history. In 1907, white workers in Bellingham drove South Asian immigrants — most of them Sikh — from their homes in a coordinated night of violence. The community came back. Shades of Green is a film about what it means to claim a place through work and persistence when you were never supposed to belong there, and about a farming culture that carried its values — hard work, community, care for the land — across an ocean and planted them somewhere new.