Danny Desjarlais (C), project manager for the Lower Sioux hempcrete team appears at the screening of “Green Buffalo” for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The film won first place in the short documentary category. Photo courtesy of Danny Desjarlais.

Patagonia’s Lower Sioux Hempcrete Doc ‘Oscar Eligible’ After Winning CA Film Festival

By Jean Lotus

Hemp-lime construction expanded further into the national spotlight this week when a California film festival awarded first prize to a short documentary featuring the Morton, MN-based Lower Sioux hempcrete building team.

Patagonia’s 19-minute documentary “The Green Buffalo” had its first official film festival screening at the Santa Barbara International Film Festiva and is headed for more festivals, director Joel Caldwell told HempBuild Magazine. The film would be eligible for the Academy Awards in 2026, Caldwell said.

“Yes, we qualify for the Oscars, but would need to do well at several more film festivals to have any real chance of getting in,” Caldwell said via text.

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*Documentary director Joel Caldwell shows off his award plaque at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Danny Desjarlais*

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Patagonia’s Work Wear division produced the film, directed by Caldwell, for its Patagonia Stories series. Caldwell also wrote a feature article about the Lower Sioux’s hempcrete program for the Patagonia catalog, which is delivered to hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide.

“It was a blessing to have Patagonia make this film about the work we are doing at the Lower Sioux,” Danny Desjarlais, the Lower Sioux’s hempcrete project manager, told HempBuild Mag via DM. “We were honored to have the film selected into the SBIFF, but to actually win the award for best documentary short was unbelievable!”

Caldwell and Desjarlais traveled to Santa Barbara in a “totally surreal week,” Caldwell said. The film team is entering the film into multiple festivals which will mean, “more eyes on the film and hopefully a mainstreaming of why we need to build differently/better,” he added.

“It's very much a climate-change related story and also a story of First Nations people and the oppression that they have been under,” Caldwell said in an interview at SBIFF. “The fact that we’re still in this political climate and social climate of today, that we’re still interested in these stories and that we’re promoting them is just really powerful. … It's an important story as we're seeing in with these recent fires in LA here, if we built our homes out of different materials we could have a different outcome,” he added.

*Lower Sioux hemp project leader Danny Desjarlais. Photo courtesy Danny Desjarlais*

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Daughter of Patagonia Founder Supported Film

Last year, the hempcrete achievements of the Lower Sioux came to the attention of Claire Chouinard, daughter of founder Yvon Chouinard, who read about the teams’ building program in Grist (republished here in HempBuildMag.)

The film crew visited the Lower Sioux community several times, Desjarlais said in an interview last year. The team filmed the crew using the Ereasy spray system to build structures on the community property, including a duplex and a retrofit project. They also constructed a small home with panels provided by Bismarck, ND- based Homeland Hempcrete.

“We were almost nervous,” he said. “I just kept telling the crew, ‘just act like they're not even here.’”

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*Crew members rip moldy insulation out of the Lower Sioux reservation home to be retrofitted. Photo by Danny Desjarlais*

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The documentary features footage of the Lower Sioux crew removing mold-covered pink fiberglass insulation for a home on the reservation as part of the renovation project.

“I saw dumpster after dumpster of toxic stuff being taken out and then, kind of shockingly quickly being replaced with the Ereasy system,” Caldwell said. “Then to see this much more simplistic, much more natural, biodegradable, non-toxic substance go back in was just really, really eye opening.”

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$5M Grant Status in Limbo

Last year the Lower Sioux received an almost $5M grant from the Environmental Protection Association for retrofitting and construction 30 homes on the reservation with hemplime. Those funds, like many grants awarded in the last days of the Biden administration, are now under question as the US regime change under President Donald Trump takes aim at the EPA and grants approved by Congress as part of the $783 billion Inflation Reduction Act.

While the grant freeze winds its way through court challenges, Desjarlais has started his own hemplime construction company Hemp Lodge.

Meanwhile, a possible string of appearances at film festivals might lead the film to the Oscars next year and give hemp-lime construction and the Lower Sioux even more of a spotlight.

After the awards were announced, Caldwell said in an interview that he was grateful for the recognition.

“That people [who] have been in film and cinema for a long time see value in a 20-minute film about a pretty niche topic — which is building homes out of a plant-based building material to build healthier homes that don’t burn and sequester carbon — … that’s powerful,” Caldwell said.