Written, produced, directed, and edited by David Sutherland, "The Farmer's Wife" is a compelling and intimate portrait of the marriage of Darrel and Juanita Buschkoetter. Sutherland gained extraordinary access to the Buschkoetters' daily lives and filmed them periodically over three years (1994-1997), staying at a motel near their farm for as many as two months at a time. The result is a remarkable intimate cinema verite portrait, without narration, that allows the viewer to respond directly to Juanita and Darrel.

The intimacy of the portrait is no accident; set in the rhythms of everyday life, every aspect of the production was carefully designed by Sutherland to achieve that crucial effect. He supervised the elegant, constantly moving hand-held camera, directing every take and watching it on a portable video monitor. At the end of each day, Sutherland and his crew would screen footage analyzing what was and wasn't working and how they could make it better. To ensure that each of his five cameramen understood the design of the film, Sutherland sent videotapes of the long, unbroken takes which captured the tension of the moment.

Sutherland also designed the sound of the films using as many as five radio microphones, which enables him to bring the audience breathtakingly close to his characters. The radio mikes allow the viewers to hear the characters breathing, sighing, groaning, and praying. When one of his camermen took ill, Sutherland turned the camera over to soundman Byron Smith and engineered the sound himself for what became the opening scene. Original music for the film was composed by legendary guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who records with artists David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, The Cure, and Public Enemy, among others.

Sutherland's love of farming began in the 1960's when he spent much of a year doing irrigation on a French-speaking kibbutz in Israel. He was invited to become a member, but his wanderlust was too powerful to resist. Back in the United States in the early 1970's Sutherland settled in Montana and supported his young family by selling agricultural tires by telephone, spending long hours talking to farmers and ranchers across the country. It wasn't until much later in the 1990's when he was in northern California making "Out of Sight," a film about a blind cowgirl, that he rediscovered his love of the land and decided that his next film would have something to do with farming. "I like a social issue backdrop for my portraits, and I like to do people out of sync with society. The Ford Foundation has discontinued Family Farmers as a category for funding, like they were extinct, and I thought, a dinosaur, now there's something I can relate to," says Sutherland. "With the median age of farmers in America being fifty-seven, young farmers were rare. I decided to make a film about a struggling young farm family who had been farming at least 1,000 acres for ten years or more. I was interested in capturing the battle to hold on to a dream."

He showed "Out of Sight" to farmers at the annual meeting of the National Family Farm Coalition in Minnesota. He forged friendships with many farm groups who put put him in touch with farm families that he would meet and move in with for a few days to decide whether they could be the subjects of his portrait. In 1994, Interchurch Ministries of Nebraska suggested he speak with Juanita Buschkoetter. When Sutherland spoke to her on the phone, he recalls, "I instantly knew this was the person I wanted. She spoke from her heart, and her love for her husband Darrel's dream touched me deeply."

Paying his first visit to the Buschkoetter’s Nebraska farm, Sutherland found himself taken with Lawrence, a town seemingly frozen in the 1950's. "They were about fifty miles from the nearest McDonald's, which is rare in America today. I went to visit them and wound up sleeping on their couch. The three little girls were very quiet -- it was like I had dropped in on them from Mars. At that point, they had never been to a movie theater. It wasn't that they were 'hicks,' but Lawrence is very Old World. The other towns around there are different, more cosmopolitan. Lawrence is almost 100 percent Catholic, its residents almost exclusively of Czech, German, and Bohemian descent, and the social life of the town revolved around the church."

Over the next few months, during several trips to Lawrence, Sutherland and his wife Nancy, got to know the Buschkoetters, and Juanita and Darrel got to know them. Sutherland shows Juanita and Darrel his portrait films to give them and appreciation of the level of intimacy and candor he was interested in capturing.

"When we were asked to do this film, I didn't want anything to do with it," says Juanita. "At first I thought it was ... a lot of invasion of privacy, but the more I thought about it, we didn't have a whole lot of privacy left anyway. After we had loan officers at the FHA, it seemed like every aspect of our life was looked at and judged by loan officers."

Looking back on the experience Juanita says: "If we could ever help somebody else out by showing them what we've gone through (with our marital problems) ... I want people to know that ... if we can make it, they can make it."