At first glance, Taggart Siegel’s new documentary, “The Real Dirt on Farmer John,” doesn’t seem like the sort of movie that would resonate with those of us who live on a concrete island with gridlocked streets.

But the closer you look, the more you realize that “Farmer John,” which will make its New York debut on Friday, is not as simple a story as it appears — and ironically, its sentiments have more to do with those living in major urban centers than with those in the rural land of central Illinois, where FarmeJohn Peterson has run his radical farm since the late 1960s.

“As we’ve traveled with the film, I’ve seen a very strong connection between the themes it explores and urban audiences, among people whose lifestyle has moved completely away from any connection to their food,” Mr. Peterson said in an interview last week. “There’s a real yearning for the land. There’s a desire to be closer — to know where your food is coming from, to have an understanding with the Earth.”

Simultaneously a story about the death and revival of the family farm, as well as a personal tale that swings from the depths of despair to the joys of realizing one’s dream, “The Real Dirt on Farmer John” is to the world of community farming what “An Inconvenient Truth” is to the world of climate change; and in many ways, Mr. Peterson is the Al Gore of his cause. As he has traveled the world in support of this film, he said he has found a growing chorus of concerned consumers and environmentally minded eaters who have taken the film as a rallying cry to embrace community farming and local farmers.

Spanning several decades, “Farmer John” documents Mr. Peterson’s unusual rise to prominence, recalling how he learned farming from his father, how the difficulties of the business caused him to lose the family farm after his father’s death, and how he later returned to the business in hopes of recapturing his parents’ dream. It was in the early 1990s, though, when Mr. Peterson’s stereotypical tale of woe became an atypical story of inspiration: Just as he faced a second implosion of the family business, he was contacted by several interested parties in Chicago, a group of urban dwellers who were looking to forge a close relationship with an area farmer.

What happened on his farm through that decade and into this century has been hailed as nothing short of a miracle by other farmers who have seen their struggling businesses spurt back to life in recent years. “Everywhere I go, I meet CFA farmers who are telling me about the demand,” Mr. Peterson said of the loose national organization known as Community Farm Alliance, which allows consumers to sign up as shareholders for specific farms (now numbering more than 2,000) and pay an annual fee for a season-long supply of produce from cash-strapped farms. “You have something that’s happening here where half a million people are starting to receive their vegetables this way. That’s an extraordinary surge of interest, it’s something significant.”

With his original shareholders in Chicago, Mr. Peterson said much the same thing is occurring right here in New York City, where dozens of farms are in business with shareholders spread out across Manhattan and other boroughs.

“It’s a model that’s most popular, ironically, in big urban areas; the organic movement is principally powered by urban people, and that’s why I’m excited to tap into that right here. I’ve always felt a close kinship with New York.”

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While Mr. Peterson is looking to revolutionize the world of farming, another movie currently showing on New York screens tells the story of how one woman helped cripple communism and the Soviet Union.

Volker Schlöndorff’s “Strike” is the true-life tale of Anna Walentynowicz, who worked for decades at a Polish shipyard and was held up as a “hero of labor” until her complaints about working conditions riled her communist superiors, prompting her ouster. Banding around their passionate and respected colleague, other workers from the shipyard, as well as other industries from across the country, went on strike in August 1980. The demands that emerged from that strike, primarily having to do with free unions, signaled the beginning of the end for the iron curtain.

For Mr. Schlöndorff, a celebrated German filmmaker known for tackling moral dilemmas in the Oscarwinning 1979 film “The Tin Drum” and 2004’s “The Ninth Day” (about the inner turmoil of a World War II clergyman offered protection in return for promoting Nazism), “Strike” presented a different and far less subtle challenge.

“This is not an art-house film, it’s propaganda,” Mr. Schlöndorff said before the film’s New York premiere. “For once I had a clear intention — I never even thought that this might reach New York. I wanted to tell the story of this amazing woman, and this amazing time, and that’s why I call it a ‘ballad,’ with the ups and downs and it has this sort of sing-song quality to it.”

That “sing-song” quality reflects the extraordinary ups and downs of one woman’s life, from raising a child on her own to being misdiagnosed with terminal cancer, enduring the premature death of a new husband, and somehow leading a social revolt despite the fact she grew up an illiterate orphan. Cutting across national boundaries, Mr. Schlöndorff said he wanted to make the film to recount an important period in Polish history, and how Ms. Walentynowicz, as well as the solidarity union federation that grew from her actions (known as Solidarnosc), were instrumental to the democratic reforms that followed.

“I meant to make this movie almost as an educational impulse for younger Polish audiences,” the director said. “Because I realized younger generations despise Solidarnosc, and they don’t seem to know what a glorious history it has — the perception in Poland is completely different. So I wanted to help them see into their past, and also to make it for a German audience, because I think they ought to appreciate what their neighbors did for them in helping the Wall to come down. For some reason they don’t make the connection, they think it came down only because of Gorbachev’s good heart.”

Ironically, Mr. Schlöndorff said one of the film’s biggest challenges arose from the international nature of the project. Determined to cast the renowned German stage veteran Katharina Thalbach in the lead role, Mr. Schlöndorff realized that since his leading actress didn’t speak Polish, he would have to dub over her scenes and try to synch the Polish dialogue with Ms. Thalbach’s actions: “If you noticed it at all, quite frankly, I failed. I was faced with a problem, because I was committed to having Katharina in the film, but I also didn’t want to do it in English, because Polish people deserve to have their own language represented, and their history preserved.”

ssnyder@nysun.com