Documentary Films .net

By Umut Newbury
April 22, 2008

On the 38th anniversary of Earth Day, an entire generation of Americans born after the introduction of this much-mocked and undervalued holiday/celebration/day of pondering can now be affectionately referred to as the “Children of the Corn.”

Anyone who pays the slightest attention to the ingredient lists of most of the food items sold at the conventional grocery stores across this country would know this, except the American consumer seems to do very little research while buying things that go directly into her body. This is why we need more investigative reporting and more documentary films on the subject of food. This is why King Corn, directed by Aaron Woolf, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, is important viewing for the average American consumer.

In King Corn, Woolf, Cheney (we hope of no relation the Cheneys of Wyoming) and Ellis spell out in very basic terms, what has gone so wrong with American agriculture and its direct product, American food. They present their hardest evidence first: Ellis and Cheney have their strands of hair analyzed at the University of Virginia. The result: the carbon in their bodies originated from corn. The two Ivy League grads seem shocked and appalled. They run to the grocery store and start reading labels of their favorite food products such as Twinkies and apple juice. They find out the obvious — most packaged foods in America contain some derivative of corn, whether it comes in the form of corn oil, the infamous and ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup or the mysterious xanthan gum. 

Instead of doing the East Coast elitist exposé composed of interviews with nutritional and agricultural talking heads (which does happen in small bits in the latter half of the 90 minutes), the directors take a softer, more personal approach to the controversial subject.

Ellis and Cheney, best friends from Yale, decide to move to Iowa for a year and grow corn to find out what happens with it. It’s not quite as extreme as the personal sacrifice of Morgan Spurlock with Supersize Me! or as abrasive (yet entertaining) as Michael Moore with his ambush interviews, but it’s an effort at least appreciated by the rural farm folk of Iowa (at first.) Read the rest of this entry »

By Umut Newbury
December 18, 2007

It is seven days from Christmas 2007 and that puts us one step closer to Shopocalypse according to Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping.

No American shopper would want to be bothered by the true impact of her consuming behavior at this time of the year. Christmas is so instilled in our social existence in North America that even the most conscientious, eco-friendly and sustainable-living oriented folks out there want to make exemptions to please loved ones. No one wants to be the Grinch. Director Rob VanAlkemade’s documentary What Would Jesus Buy? is a sobering film about the lengths we all go to avoid being the Grinch and how we are hurling ourselves toward Shopocalypse because of our consumerism and over-consumption. Read the rest of this entry »

By Umut Newbury
October 10, 2007

Tom Jackson’s Out of Balance: ExxonMobil’s Impact on Climate Change, which premiered on satellite television channel World Link this week, exposes not only exactly what this big oil company has done to spin the debate on global warming but also tells us specifically why we should not buy into its propaganda.

In Out of Balance, Jackson arms himself with a number of climate change experts such as Michael Oppenheimer and Bill McKibben. These experts take us step by step through the facts surrounding global warming. For example, it is a known fact that there is a link between carbon dioxide and temperature. Scientists have collected data from ice cores that can tell us how atmosphere and temperature changed over the last 400,000 years. What they found is that the warming of the last few decades is inconsistent with the natural warming patterns of our planet.

The United Nations General Assembly called for an assessment of climate change almost 20 years ago – in 1988. The best climate scientists of the world wrote a report, which was reviewed by hundreds of other scientists. By 1995, the world scientists were in a consensus: This is going to be a serious problem. 

Many people have argued since Hurricane Katrina that obviously climate change is not so bad or it doesn’t exist, because we have not had another Katrina. The scientists Jackson interviews clarify this fallacy once and for all. Global warming does not mean that there will be an increase in the number of storms per se, but the tropical storms that do form will become stronger because of the warming oceans.

Bill McKibben points out that though we are all responsible for the unusual warming of our planet, every problem has a face and the image of global warming includes ExxonMobil and its former CEO Lee Raymond. 

While considered a hall of famer in the area of CEOs who maximize shareholder profitability, Raymond also is known for managing to delay action on climate change for over a decade. Jackson points out that while many large energy corporations such as BP are trying to green their image with slogans like “Beyond Petroleum,” ExxonMobil is proud to be just an oil company. Read the rest of this entry »

By Umut Newbury
August 24, 2007

Film is still one of the best mediums out there for grassroots action. 

What else could have the power to bring together nonprofit groups from New York, community activists from the Midwest, and students, academics, farmers and foodies to a sleepy little college town in Kansas? 

Before the screening of the “Go Organic!” short film series in Lawrence, Kan., on Aug. 23, one could sign up to rally against the exploitation of farm workers by Burger King; speak out against genetically engineered rice farming experiment in Junction City, Kan.; or learn about a biodiesel bus trip across America.

The Lawrence-based nonprofit Films for Action, Local Burger restaurant and the New York-based nonprofit Sustainable Table were the presenting partners of the screening. Rural Route Films, a New York nonprofit which highlights films that deal with rural places and people, originally put the series together and offered it up for screenings nationwide. (Check the group’s myspace page for upcoming screenings: www.myspace.com/ruralroutefilmfestival)

Sustainable Table was in town as a part of their “Eat Well Guided Tour of America,” a bus tour which started in California earlier this month and is headed to New York for this year’s Farm Aid concert on Sept. 9. 

The featured speaker of the evening was the new local celebrity Simran Sethi, host/writer of the Sundance Channel’s new program, “The Green,” and a lecturer at the University of Kansas School of Journalism. She quickly set the tone for the evening: “We are what we eat and where we eat. The choices we make for food not only affect our health, but our community and economy.”

Hilary Brown, owner of the Local Burger restaurant in  Lawrence, Kan., provided the free organic fare for the audience before the screening and offered one solid advice: “Educate yourself about genetically engineered food.”

Tim Hjersted of Films for Action explained the beginnings of his nonprofit group in 2006. “We realized that the way the overcome many of the problems we’re facing today is to overcome the media itself.”  The Films for Action group has been showing documentaries locally for a $2 admission and is also planning on a free lending library of all the DVDs in its collection.

The evening started with by now the very-Internet-famous, The Meatrix. The brainchild of the Sustainable Table group, The Meatrix, is not a documentary short, but rather an anime information film about factory farming. It has enjoyed wide popularity for its witty and cute spinoff on the blockbuster movie, The Matrix. In this short, instead of Keanu Reeves, we get Leo the pig who takes the red pill from Moopheus and sees the truth about factory farming. The Meatrix, as Moopheus puts it, is “the lie we tell ourselves about where our food comes from.”

First on the “Go Organic!” series was Frankensteer from Alberta, Canada. Frankensteer examines how the modern agriculture industry took the cow and experimented with it to turn it into the perfect food machine. The film features stunning footage of Alberta’s “Feedlot Alley,” where one million cows are housed and slaughtered each year. From the bird’s eye view shots, all we see are muddy, dirty open-air pens where hundreds of thousands of cows are squeezed in together. Directors Ted Remerowski and Marrin Canell then take us to Bob Kerr’s free-range cattle farm, where cows graze happily on green pasture. Kerr calls it “Heifer Heaven.” The film shows how the life of the cow started to change in the 1960s, when industrial farmers figured out how to fatten it cheap and fast by what they call “grain finishing.” Rick Paskal, a feedlot operator in Alberta, says, “Grain-finished beef produces the marbled meat which the consumer demands.” But farming expert Tim McAllister explains how cows would have never evolved to eating grain naturally because it makes them sick to their stomachs. In 2005, hundreds of cows died in Alberta’s “Feedlot Alley” after eating too much grain, which made them drink too much water and freeze to death.  Read the rest of this entry »

By Umut Newbury
June 8, 2007

The mega-corporation, Monsanto, probably does not ring a bell in the minds of most American consumers. But it happens to be one of the main producers of the Vietnam Era’s infamous Agent Orange; the creator of farm and lawn pesticide Roundup; maker of cow growth hormone rBGH; and now the owner of more than 90 percent of all genetically engineered seed in the U.S. as well as some 11,000-plus genetically engineered seed patents across the globe.

The controversy over genetically engineered seeds and subsequently food, has been going on for quite some time and gets very little coverage in the mainstream media. So, what is an informed, concerned citizen to do to alert her fellow eaters? Deborah Koons Garcia, writer and director (also the wife of the late Jerry Garcia) decided to explore the whole issue in an 88-minute documentary titled, The Future of Food. Read the rest of this entry »

By Umut Newbury
March 5, 2007

What do Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Danny Kaye and John Huston have in common?

They are legendary Hollywood stars beloved to this day by average Americans. No one would dare call them unpatriotic today. In September of 1947, they had the courage to form a group called the Committee for the First Amendment to stand up and protest the infamous McCarthy witch hunt of House Committee on Un-American Activities.

In the following 60 years, Americans seem to have forgotten that sometimes, it takes high profile celebrities to capture the spotlight and speak up against government activities that regular folks question. Somehow, in the post 9/11 world, we are OK with gawking at photos of Tom Cruise’s baby, Britney Spears’ head shaving adventures and the televised custody proceedings for Anne Nicole Smith’s orphaned infant. But we’ve made sport of making fun of the likes of Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn and Kanye West. We want to know every little dirty secret of our celebrities, except for what they have to say about what’s going on in the world.

Enter into this twisted worldview some unlikely characters and you’ve got a very fascinating documentary about the Orwellian madness in which we live. Shut Up & Sing chronicles the First Amendment battle of the Dixie Chicks – three Texan country stars who previously brought the American public such culturally illuminating songs as “Goodbye Earl.”

In 2003, Natalie Maines, Emily Robison and Martie Maguire sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. They were the best selling female group of all time and Lipton tea was the official sponsor of their “Top of the World” tour. It just so happened that at the same time, the United States was preparing to go to war in Iraq. When the Dixie Chicks showed up in London on March 10, there were thousands of people in the streets rallying against the war. With that backdrop to their concert, Natalie Maines did what a lot of entertainers would have done, which is to make sure that the frustration people feel about some people from Texas does not spread to others like herself and her bandmates. So, she said a few words: “We’re with you on this one. We don’t want this war. We’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” And the crowd cheered loudly. The band had a great performance, their manager Simon Renshaw told them they rocked the house and they moved on to their next stop. In the meanwhile, The Guardian proceeded to quote Maines and the U.S. media soon followed. Within days, the reputation as well as the lives of three good ole girls from the Lone Star state would change forever. Read the rest of this entry »

By Umut Newbury
December 13, 2006

For several years now, the Organic Consumers Association in the United States has been referring to genetically engineered foods with the affectionate phrase: “Frankenfoods.”

Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest documentary, Our Daily Bread, illustrates grimly in about an hour and a half how all food, crops and animals, raised in the industrial agricultural system qualify as Frankenfoods.

Our Daily Bread shows us the nightmare that is producing food for 6 billion of us on this planet in the 21st century. We all partake in it everyday of our lives, yet so few of us really think of where our food comes from. Geyrhalter has tracked down for us exactly where filet mignon and eggs and bacon, even tomatoes, peppers and apples come from, and it is not pretty. The 21st century human being is so cut off from the reality of foodstuffs that it seems the more we don’t look, the worse it gets.

Geyrhalter spent two years across Europe on factory farms, shooting images of pigs, cows and chickens being slaughtered by the thousands. Think of the scene in Baraka where the accidentally hatched baby chicks were being gassed in an egg factory, then multiply it by as dozen or so times. Unlike Baraka, there is not a score substituting for narrative in Our Daily Bread. Geyrhalter’s piece is virtually quiet, except for the sound of machines, muffled human voices and lots and lots of water hoses. There are so many shots of cleaning and watering in the film, it is difficult not to remember Lady Macbeth. Human beings industrialized food production and brought it indoors to confined crowded environments and the result is lots of blood and chemicals that need to be washed from the bunny suits of workers, the floors and the equipment again and again. But water will not wash our sins away and the workers in Geyrhalter’s film seem to be aware of this. The only thing more disturbing in the film than the cruel and unusual treatment and killing of the animals is the situation of the people who work at these factories. Though we have managed to invent lots of machines to help with the dirty work, it seems the most gruesome duties are still reserved for the human workers. There has to be a person to give a cow a C-section, a person euthanize pigs and a person to cut off the heads of chickens. None of the factory farm workers in Our Daily Bread look happy or pleased with their jobs.

The situation in the fields does not look any brighter. In one scene, a field of beautiful flowers is suddenly overshadowed by a crop duster spraying pesticides; in many others Geyrhalter shows us acres and acres of land devoted to the cultivation of one single plant. Workers in these fields and greenhouses seem like robots picking produce, watering or applying a concoction of chemicals. We even get a glimpse of a field supervisor with his binoculars watching the workers on the field, reminding us of the ironic similarity to days of plantations and slavery. Even salt miners look dehumanized as they travel hundreds of feet below the European continent and find themselves in a massive maze of gigantic tunnels for the simplest of dinner table items.

We have put an end to the reign of the family farm, the natural biodiversity and ecological balance. We have consolidated food production, putting it under roofs that house hundreds of thousands of chickens and pigs, we have invented machines and conveyor belts to make the production faster, and the people who now work for feeding the world look like zombies. All this, for what? Cheap food and lots of it, for sure. There are so many mouths to be fed in this world that naturally food production needed to increase and live up to the demand. But a first year economics student could easily tell that this has to do not just with supply meeting demand but with profit-making as well. There is nothing inherently wrong with desiring a profitable industry and feeding the world at the same time, but the those of us who consume the products of this morally disturbing system meal after meal must start asking the question, “At what cost?”

Geyrhalter said this in a recent interview:

“… it becomes the scandal of how we live, because this economic, “soulless” efficiency is a reciprocal relationship with our society’s lifestyle. There is nothing wrong with saying, “Buy organic products! Eat less meat!” But at the same time it’s kind of excuse, because we all enjoy the fruits of automation and industrialization and globalization every day, which affect much more than just food.”

It’s true and Geyrhalter’s chosen technique in Our Daily Bread, sans narration or score, helps the viewer contemplate upon this.

This film should be required viewing for anyone who eats. These images should be replaying in every consumer’s head while buying groceries or ordering lunch at a restaurant. It is time we stop corn-syrup coating the hellish nightmare we call food in the 21st century.

—–

Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter

92 minutes/ Color

2005

Purchase at First Run/Icarus Films

By Umut Newbury
November 26, 2006

Since their victory on Nov. 7, the Democratic leaders have pledged to make raising the minimum wage among their top priorities. If they want to accomplish that goal they should make sure to have all of their Republican colleagues view Roger Weisberg’s Waging a Living before the debates begin.

The federal minimum wage has remained at $5.15 per hour since 1997. According to The New York Times, when adjusted for inflation, the buying power of the wage has dropped to its lowest level since 1955. By December, The Times reported recently, the minimum wage will have remained unchanged for the longest period since it was established in 1938.

Weisberg follows four Americans over a period of three years in Waging a Living, three women and one man. Jean Reynolds, a rest home nurse in New Jersey, is recently divorced and is taking care of her children, one of whom is a 29-year-old cancer patient, and her children as well. Jerry Langoria, a security guard in San Francisco earns $12 per hour, but can only afford a small room in a hotel for $530 per month.

Weisberg points out several facts throughout the documentary such as, after 10 years, of those who start in poverty 50 percent stay there. After a divorce, in the year following a man’s standard of living increases by 10 percent while a woman’s decreases by 27 percent. An estimated 18,000 Americans die every year for lack of health insurance. Read the rest of this entry »