Hemp for Victory

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"HFV" redirects here. For other uses, see HFV (disambiguation).

Hemp For Victory

Directed by	Raymond Evans
Produced by	U.S. Department of Agriculture
Written by	Brittain B. Robinson
Starring	Lee D. Vickers (Narrator)
Music by	Reuben Ford (Monaural)
Release date(s)	1942
Running time	16 minutes
Language	English
IMDb profile

Hemp for Victory is a black-and-white United States government film made during the Second World War, explaining the uses of hemp, encouraging farmers to grow as much as possible.

1 History
2 Book
3 Images
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] History

The film was made to encourage farmers to grow hemp for the war effort because the United States was facing a hemp shortage. The intended audience was probably corn farmers in Kentucky, since the narrator emphasizes that land used to grow corn could also grow hemp, and a segment from the song My Old Kentucky Home can be heard on the soundtrack. The film shows a history of hemp and hemp products, how hemp is grown, and how hemp processed into rope, cloth, cordage and other products.

As it was made by the US Government, it is public domain and is freely available for download on the Internet.

Before 1989, the film was relatively unknown, and the United States Department of Agriculture library and the Library of Congress told all interested parties that no such movie was made by the USDA or any branch of the U.S. government. Two VHS copies were recovered and donated to the Library of Congress on May 19, 1989 by Maria Farrow, Carl Packard, and Jack Herer.

The only known copy, at the time 1976, was a 3/4" broadcast quality copy of the film that was originally obtained by William Conde in 1976 from a reporter for the Miami Herald and the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church of Jamaica. It was given in trust that it would be made available to as many as possible. It was put into the hands of Jack Herer by William Conde during the 1984 OMI (Oregon Marijuana Initiative). The film 20 years later is now available anywhere through the internet.

[edit] Book

Hemp for Victory is also the title of a book about hemp, published 2006 in London by Whitaker Press (ISBN 0-9549939-0-X). It is the work of several authors active in the hemp world, including Kenyon Gibson, Nick and Cindy Mackintosh, Woody Harrelson, Mina Hegaard and Sam Heslop.