Director of Photography Mark Schulze videotapes CNNC conference in San Diego

NECTARBALL: The Story of Cannabis

An award-winning feature documentary

NECTARBALL

The Story of Cannabis

A seven-year investigation across four continents into the plant, the policy and the people behind cannabis’s past, present and fast-arriving future.

Running time80 minutes
Directed byMark Schulze
Written and produced byPatty Mooney

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From ancient medicine to modern industry.

NECTARBALL traces how science, culture and law shaped one of the world’s most contested plants.

Dozens of candid interviews move past the clichés: patients, physicians, cultivators, activists, entrepreneurs, regulators, historians and skeptics, each holding a piece of the truth. They often disagree, and the film lets that tension stand so you can weigh the claims yourself.

Patty Mooney, Tommy Chong and Mark Schulze smiling together in front of tropical leaves
Patty Mooney, Tommy Chong and Mark Schulze.

Four festival wins

Where the film goes

  1. CaliforniaMedical and adult-use markets
  2. AmsterdamThe pragmatic Dutch approach
  3. ArgentinaA movement led by patients
  4. UruguayThe first national legalization
  5. South AfricaOld traditions and new court rulings

Each place is a case study in a different answer to the same question. The film pairs those stories with lab perspectives, archival footage, and families dealing with illness, access and stigma.

Interviews are shot in natural light, with the sound of each location left in, so you’re in the homes, clinics, courthouse steps, grow rooms and gatherings where the story is happening.

Patty Mooney and Mark Schulze interview Mila Jansen in Amsterdam
Interviewing Mila Jansen in Amsterdam, 2018.

Five threads run through it

Antique cannabis tincture bottles in a museum case
Cannabis tinctures from the years it was sold as medicine.

Medicine and science

The endocannabinoid system, what clinicians and patients report, the arguments over dosing, and where current research runs out.

Museum exhibit on the drug war with a large slatted portrait of Richard Nixon
An exhibit on the Controlled Substances Act and the drug war.

Law and policy

How prohibition took root, why reform has moved unevenly, and what different rules mean for safety, fairness and the illicit market.

A grower stands among tall flowering cannabis plants in a backyard garden
A backyard grow at harvest time.

Economy and industry

Small craft growers, corporate newcomers, testing labs and supply chains, and the pull between community roots and fast commercialization.

A gallery wallpapered with 1930s anti-marijuana movie posters
A gallery of 1930s “reefer madness” posters.

Culture and stigma

Media narratives, racialized enforcement, and the personal costs carried by people who use cannabis and people who don’t.

A woman with a red flower in her braided hair speaks at a conference microphone
A question from the floor at the CNNC conference in San Diego.

Ethics and equity

Expungement, social equity licensing, and the duty to include the communities the drug war harmed most.

“Your perspective of the world is kind of like you have a wider, higher perspective of it. You’re part of it. You’re part of it all.”

Patty Mooney, on the Bite Me podcast

Patty Mooney flashes a peace sign and Mark Schulze gives a thumbs-up in a colorful gallery
Patty and Mark.

Seven years behind the camera

The film took seven years of fieldwork across several continents. Access came from long relationships and trust built on site, which is how the camera catches the candid moments news coverage misses.

Mark Schulze in headphones runs a broadcast camera at a conference
Director of Photography Mark Schulze filming the CNNC conference in San Diego.
A camera operator in a green cap sits between two cameras facing a stage
The second camera at CNNC.
A visitor smells a terpene sample tube in front of a Beta Caryophyllene panel
Smelling the terpenes at a museum exhibit.
Mark Schulze in a cap and Ed Rosenthal in a blue shirt talk in a kitchen
DP Mark Schulze chats with Ed Rosenthal before the interview.
Dr. Raphael Mechoulam speaks from a podium on a conference stage before a large audience
Dr. Raphael Mechoulam’s final visit to the USA.

Following one harvest

On one shoot, the crew followed a crop from the field to the jar.

  1. Two men stand beside a small red and yellow propeller plane on an airport apron
    Arriving by small plane.
  2. A man in sunglasses and a red T-shirt stands with arms crossed before cannabis plants twice his height
    Outdoor plants that tower over the grower.
  3. Hands holding trimming scissors and a freshly trimmed bud over a mesh tray of harvested cannabis
    Hand-trimming the harvest.
  4. A camera operator films a masked worker trimming cannabis in a large trim room
    Filming in the trim room.
  5. A hand holds an open glass jar of dried cannabis flower
    Cured and in the jar.

Who you’ll hear from

About the film

Format
Feature documentary
Running time
80 minutes
Filmed in
The United States, the Netherlands, Argentina, Uruguay and South Africa
Also streaming on
Prime Video, NextEnt TV, LifeVista TV, Future Today and Red Coral Universe

Credits

Directed by
Mark Schulze
Written and produced by
Patty Mooney
Studio
New & Unique Videos®
High Times logo over a photo of two people walking into a tall outdoor cannabis garden

More from the filmmakers

Patty Mooney has written about cannabis for High Times.

Meet one of the film’s nurses in Cannabis Nurse Heather, and see the companion film Fighting Cancer With Cannabis.

Two ways to see it

Watch it yourself

Stream the complete film right here with a one-time payment. No subscription.

Unlock the full film for $4.20

Screen it for a group

For classrooms, dispensary education nights, nursing programs, festivals and community screenings, ask us about licensing.

Ask about licensing

Patty Mooney and Mark Schulze are San Diego documentarians and the co-founders of New & Unique Videos, making independent documentary, educational and music films since 1985.