DESCRIPTION:
Snow Falling on Cedars is a film directed by Scott Hicks. It is based on David Guterson's award-winning novel of the same title. It was released in 1999 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Acclaimed film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film 3 1/2 out of 4 stars and began by writing "Snow Falling on Cedars is a rich, multilayered film about a high school romance and a murder trial a decade later" and went on to say it "reveals itself with the complexity of a novel, holding its themes up to the light so that first one and then another aspect can be seen."

Cast:
Ethan Hawke as Ishmael Chambers
Reeve Carney as Young Ishmael Chambers
James Cromwell as Judge Fielding
Richard Jenkins as Sheriff Art Moran
James Rebhorn as Alvin Hooks
Sam Shepard as Arthur Chambers
Max von Sydow as Nels Gudmundsson
Youki Kudoh as Hatsue Miyamoto
Anne Suzuki as Young Hatsue Imada
Rick Yune as Kazuo Miyamoto
Seiji Inouye as Young Kazuo Miyamoto
Celia Weston as Etta Heine

A fence is a structure that encloses an area, typically outdoors, and is usually constructed from posts that are connected by boards, wire, rails or netting. A fence differs from a wall in not having a solid foundation along its whole length.

Servitudes are legal arrangements of land use arising out of private agreements. Under the feudal system, most land in England was cultivated in common fields, where peasants were allocated strips of arable land that were used to support the needs of the local village or manor. By the sixteenth century the growth of population and prosperity provided incentives for landowners to use their land in more profitable ways, dispossessing the peasantry. Common fields were aggregated and enclosed by large and enterprising farmers—either through negotiation among one another or by lease from the landlord—to maximize the productivity of the available land and contain livestock. Fences redefined the means by which land is used, resulting in the modern law of servitudes.


A wattle fence at Sanok-Skansen outdoor museum in Poland
In the United States, the earliest settlers claimed land by simply fencing it in. Later, as the American government formed, unsettled land became technically owned by the government and programs to register land ownership developed, usually making raw land available for low prices or for free, if the owner improved the property, including the construction of fences. However, the remaining vast tracts of unsettled land were often used as a commons, or, in the American West, "open range" as degradation of habitat developed due to overgrazing and a tragedy of the commons situation arose, common areas began to either be allocated to individual landowners via mechanisms such as the Homestead Act and Desert Land Act and fenced in, or, if kept in public hands, leased to individual users for limited purposes, with fences built to separate tracts of public and private land.