Sweetgrass
April 21 & 23, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, “Sweetgrass” follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.
Trailers
King Corn
April 29, RCiL Building, Utica
King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm.
Visit: http://www.kingcorn.net
Our Daily Bread
May 6, Capitol Theater, Rome
Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming! To the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines, the film looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system which provides our society’s standard of living.
Visit: http://www.ourdailybread.at
Big River: A King Corn Companion
May 13, RCiL Building, Utica
King Corn tells the story of how Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, college friends from Boston, move to Iowa to plant an acre of corn and follow their harvest into the food system. In Big River, they investigate the environmental impact their acre of corn has had on the people and places downstream.
Visit: http://www.bigriverfilm.com/
The Future Of Food
May 4, The Tramontane Cafe, Utica
The Future of Food has been a key tool in the American and international anti-GMO grassroots activist movements and played widely in the environmental and activist circuits since its release in 2004. The film is widely acknowledged for its role in educating voters and the subsequent success of passing Measure H in Mendocino County, California, one of the first local initiatives in the country to ban the planting of GMO crops. Indicative of its popularity, the Future of Food showed to a sold out audience of 1,500 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco in 2004, a benefit for Slow Food, where it was introduced by Alice Waters.
The Real Dirt on Farmer John
May 17, The Other Side, Utica
The epic tale of a maverick Midwestern farmer. An outcast in his community, Farmer John bravely stands amidst a failing economy, vicious rumors, and violence. By melding the traditions of family farming with the power of art and free expression, this powerful story of transformation and renewal heralds a resurrection of farming in America. The film is a haunting odyssey, capturing what it means to be different in rural America.
Visit: Official Website
Fresh
May 20, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica
FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet.
Visit: http://www.freshthemovie.com
Back to the Land...Again
May 10, The Other Side, Utica
The methods we use to grow our food impact our personal and environmental health as well as global trade policies far removed from our dinner tables. “Back to the Land...Again” presents the state of organics today by highlighting the beautiful farms and sustainable practices of a collection of farms in Wisconsin.
Visit: Official Website
What’s On Your Plate?
April 27, Utica Public Library
May 2, Sullivan Free Library, Chittenango
May 11, CW Clark Memorial Library, Oriskany Falls
May 12, Jervis Public Library, Rome
May 18, Cazenovia Public Library
What’s On Your Plate? is a witty and provocative documentary produced and directed by award-winning Catherine Gund about kids and food politics. Filmed over the course of one year, the film follows two eleven-year-old multi-racial city kids as they explore their place in the food chain. Sadie and Safiyah take a close look at food systems in New York City and its surrounding areas. With the camera as their companion, the girl guides talk to each other, food activists, farmers, new friends, storekeepers, their families, and the viewer, in their quest to understand what’s on all of our plates.
Two Angry Moms
May 24, Dunham Public Library, Whitesboro
Amy Kalafa was stewing for years, packing her kids lunches from home and trying to get her community to pay attention to what kids are eating in school. When news of a national child health crisis began making headlines, Amy, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, decided to take the fight to film. Two Angry Moms is Amy's quest to learn what she and other parents need to know and do to get better food in their kids' schools.
Visit: http://www.angrymoms.org/
All in This Tea
May 27, Utica College
In All In This Tea (2007), Les Blank's handheld camera takes us into the hidden world of tea by following world-renowned tea expert David Lee Hoffman to some of the most remote regions of China in search of the best handmade teas in the world.
Hoffman is obsessed; during his youth, he spent four years with Tibetan monks in Nepal, which included a friendship with the Dalai Lama, and was introduced to some of the finest tea--that golden nectar with which we can taste the distant past.
Visit: http://www.allinthistea.com/
