Film

Kiss the Ground

Name: Kiss the Ground
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2020
Cast: Woody Harrelson, David Arquette, Gisele Bündchen, Rosario Dawson, Jason Mraz

Kiss the Ground is a glossy, celebrity-narrated call to arms about the dirt beneath our feet. Woody Harrelson guides you through farmers, soil scientists and A-list true believers making the case that regenerative agriculture could reverse climate change. It's polished, urgent, occasionally overreaching, and built for easy streaming: designed to make you rethink dirt, harder to fully fact-check.

TMDb rating

3.8

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you want a hopeful, plainspoken case for farming that heals soil, the kind of documentary that treats a patch of dirt as the start of a big idea and leaves you wanting to tell someone about it.

Skip it if you want rigorous science or a skeptical look at agriculture, since this is an earnest, celebrity-fronted advocacy piece that leans on inspiring montage more than hard data or opposing voices.

What it asks of you: Eighty-five minutes of easygoing talk, interviews and sweeping landscape footage, with a mild, steady pace and an open, optimistic mood throughout, asking mainly for your willingness to be persuaded.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

The Biggest Little Farm2019

The lived version of everything Kiss the Ground argues in theory: a couple rebuild degraded land into a thriving regenerative farm over eight gorgeous, difficult years, filmed with real intimacy.

But It's a farm-life memoir more than an argument — light on science, heavy on personal narrative and animal cuteness.

Food, Inc.2008

The film that started the modern food-documentary wave, laying bare how industrial agriculture actually works before regenerative farming became a fashionable counter-argument to it.

But Dated now — its shock footage and statistics have been superseded by more than a decade of follow-up reporting.

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret2014

Blunt and conspiratorial, arguing livestock farming is the environmental story nobody wants told, with the same activist urgency and single-issue focus as Kiss the Ground.

But Its numbers have been widely disputed and the tone is closer to crusade than balanced documentary.

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Kiss the Ground

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Plow That Broke the Plains1936

This is the original American soil documentary — a government film that convinced a nation the Dust Bowl was a man-made catastrophe of bad farming, decades before 'regenerative agriculture' had a name.

Twenty-five black-and-white minutes of astonishing, plain-spoken propaganda-as-poetry, scored like a horror film, that turned soil erosion into a national emergency and basically invented the genre Kiss the Ground belongs to.

But It's a government-funded historical short, not a modern documentary — no talking heads, no narrative arc, just dust and warning.

20402019

The same hopeful, solutions-first spirit as Kiss the Ground, but wider-lens — a filmmaker touring the regenerative and renewable technologies that could already fix things by his daughter's adulthood.

But The relentless optimism can tip into sales pitch, and some of its imagined futures already look dated.

An Inconvenient Truth2006

The granddaddy of the genre, worth revisiting to see how far the climate documentary has traveled from slideshow lecture to soil-based hope.

But It's essentially a PowerPoint with a movie budget, and Gore's delivery has aged into something closer to camp.

Our Planet2019

Attenborough at his most explicitly activist, pairing breathtaking wildlife footage with a direct warning about ecosystem collapse — the flip side of Kiss the Ground's soil optimism.

But Eight hour-long episodes is a bigger commitment, and several sequences are genuinely upsetting to sit through.

Chasing Coral2017

A tighter, sadder cousin to Kiss the Ground: the same underdog scientists racing against time, but underwater, and without the redemptive third act.

But It's a grief film more than a hope film — there's no easy fix offered here.

Seaspiracy2021

Same activist-documentary machinery, aimed at the ocean instead of the soil, with a similarly confident tone about a solution most people haven't heard of.

But Heavily criticized for cherry-picked statistics and misrepresented interviews — worth watching skeptically.

The True Cost2015

Turns the same regenerative-optimism format toward fashion, tracing your shirt back to the same soil and labor systems Kiss the Ground wants to heal.

But It's the bleakest of the bunch, with far less of a hopeful ending on offer.

Snowpiercer2013

Same premise Kiss the Ground gestures at — that we might wreck the climate trying to fix it — pushed to its bleakest logical extreme: a failed climate-engineering scheme freezes the world, and survivors are trapped on a train.

A vicious, brilliantly designed class-war thriller that takes the climate-engineering anxiety underneath Kiss the Ground and turns it into pulpy, brutal, unforgettable science fiction.

But It's violent, allegorical, and has zero interest in real-world solutions — pure dystopian spectacle, not a policy argument.

Down to Earth with Zac Efron2020

Made the same year, with the same breezy celebrity-narrator formula as Kiss the Ground, but Efron takes the regenerative-agriculture pitch on the road as a travel show instead of a manifesto.

A lighter, funnier way into the same ideas — Efron visiting solar villages, sustainable farms and clean-water projects with genuine, goofy curiosity instead of a thesis to prove.

But It's fluffier and less rigorous — more travelogue than argument, and the celebrity-tourist framing can feel thin.