Agatha Bock doesn’t need your help. The 90-year-old tends her massive garden, bakes and cans everything she eats, and hasn’t had running water in a decade. She’s doing just fine, thank you.

Her niece, filmmaker Amalie Atkins, spent six years filming Agatha’s daily routines on her rural Manitoba farm, and the result is stunning. AGATHA’S ALMANAC opens May 15 at New York’s Film Forum for its U.S. theatrical premiere.

Shot on 16mm by an all-female crew led by cinematographer Rhayne Vermette, the doc captures Agatha’s fierce independence with visual poetry. Watch her harvest a 15-pound watermelon by kicking it along with her rubber boot. See her preserve heirloom seeds and maintain her ancestral farm without a car, cell phone, or functioning landline.

The film already won Best Canadian Feature Documentary at Hot Docs and made TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten list for 2025. Critics are calling it “tender and melancholy but so full of life” and praising its “wondrously luminous” cinematography that makes Agatha’s strawberries look impossibly red and her watermelons eye-poppingly pink.

This is what indie documentary filmmaking looks like when it’s done right. No agenda, no manufactured drama. Just a niece learning from her aunt that a handmade, independent life can be its own kind of art.