Free Screening of KING CORN: A Look at Food Activist Films
If you love to eat or cook, then you must be loving summer with its bounty of corn, fruit, melons, tomatoes, squash, and more. Every day we find more new tomatoes in our backyard containers, some just starting to turn orange on their way to red. In another month, we'll be eating them right off the vine.
More and more of us are doing what we can to eat local, to grow what we can, and to consider the politics of today's industrial food supply. It's important to improve our health and to avoid the dystopia depicted in that great drive-in classic from the 1970s, SOYLENT GREEN, about a food shortage in 2022. Whole Foods Market is helping to raise awareness about food sources with its monthly online film festival, DO SOMETHING REEL. We love it when people mix food and film, so we're alerting our viewers to this on-going online film fest by offering you a chance to watch the July films for free, courtesy of DO SOMETHING REEL FILM FESTIVAL and Whole Food Market.
DO SOMETHING REEL FILM FESTIVAL features a new food activist documentary each month. For July, the film is KING CORN (it's such a great film that we also offer it) along with a fun short film, FOOD TRUCK.
KING CORN is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. Filmmakers 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.
To cover costs of the online film series, DO SOMETHING REEL FILM FESTIVAL charges a fee that covers the costs of obtaining the film from the filmmaker, helping out filmmakers with grants, and highlighting on its Website some background on the film and the issues along with providing links for people who want to become more involved. But they're working with us to offer free screenings for the July films. The first ten people who email me at katie@filmfresh.com will get a code good to use for streaming the July films, courtesy of DO SOMETHING REEL FILM FESTIVAL and Whole Food Market. If you like this partnership, let me know -- we can extend it into the future.
Food documentaries are made by passionate activists, and so by their very nature these are indie films, and indie films are Film Fresh's specialty. We have a number of great films about food politics for rent or purchase on our Website and our stores on our Android app and some Blu-ray players and Internet-connected TVs:
FOOD, INC. -- the original film that launched the food activist film genre back in 2008 is just as relevant today in explaining how policies from the USDA and FDA serve industrial food production and how our food supply, environmental health, and physical well being are being put at risk by agribusiness. Includes interviews with the award-winning writer Michael Pollan. Rotten Tomatoes score is 96%
(Check out this fun short, stop-motion film, MICHAEL POLLAN'S FOOD RULES, by Marija Jacimovic, winner of the RSA/Nominet Trust Film Competition.)
VEGUCATED -- this is a funny, guerrilla-style look at meat-loving friends who document their experience going vegan for six weeks. Part sociological experiment and part adventure comedy, VEGUCATED reveals the evolution of three people who are trying their darnedest to change in a culture that seems dead set against it. There's no Rotten Tomatoes score for activist Marisa Miller Wolfson's film, but IMDB gives it a rating of 8.7/10.
FORKS OVER KNIVES -- ever wonder if the medical community really stands behind all these vegetarian fads? Lee Fulkerson's documentary digs deep by interviewing the surgeons and scientists who have proven the health benefits of plant-based diets. This doc has a Flixster score of 82% and a Web site dedicated to helping people change their eating patterns.
FARMAGEDDON -- this is a highly personal documentary made by a mother, Kristin Cantry, whose son's allergies disappeared when he drank raw milk. She got so frustrated by how the food industry hampers raw milk suppliers that she made this grass-roots documentary. It's got heart.
KING CORN -- yes, we sell this fantastic documentary, so you have the option to get a free rental of the film, courtesy of DO SOMETHING REEL FILM FESTIVAL, or rent it from their site, or rent or buy it from us!
-> THE FINAL DAY FOR THE FREE RENTALS IS JULY 31 -- you need to email me at katie@filmfresh.com to get a code for your free screening of KING CORN and FOOD TRUCK from DO SOMETHING REEL FILM FESTIVAL (don't miss the July 31 deadline!).
