2009-10 film series: Films on Food & Farming

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We hosted a food film series monthly on Thursday nights throughout the 2009-10 academic year. All films will start at 7 pm at the Bell Auditorium at the Bell Museum of Natural History (map) and were done in conjunction with the Hungry Planet exhibit at the museum. Members of the group facilitated a short (approx. 30 min.) discussion after each film.
  • Thursday, October 8: Fresh (Discussion moderated by Valentine Cadieux, Rachel Schurman, and Jerry Shannon) 
    In an era when food is often a source of anxiety, confusion, and guilt,Fresh argues that better options are already around us. It presents several American alternative food producers as trailblazers to a more sustainable and healthier future.
  • Thursday, November 12: Black Gold (Discussion moderated by Rachel Schurman)
    Coffee is the second most actively traded commodity in the world with $80 billion in retail sales. Tracing the path of the coffee consumed each day to the farmers who produce the beans, Black Gold asks us to “wake up and smell the coffee”, to face the unjust conditions under which coffee is produced and to decide what needs to be done about it.
  • Thursday, December 10: Big Night (Discussion moderated by Jeffrey Pilcher) 
    Two immigrant brothers (Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub) run a small trattoria serving the finest of Italian regional cooking.Unfortunately, it's 1950s New Jersey, and customers expect heaping mounds of spaghetti and meatballs. Can their "big night" with a star guest save the day?
  • Thursday, February 4: HomeGrown (Discussion moderated by Jerry Shannon)
    The Dervaes family grows over 6,000 pounds of produce on one city lot in Pasadena, CA. Relying mainly on their own words, this documentary provides a portrait of how they moved from conventional homeowners to cultivating their own urban “homestead.”
  • Thursday, March 4: The Gleaners and I (Discussion moderated by Joaquin Contreras and Ursula Lang)
    Follow Agnes Varda, grande dame of the French New Wave, on this “wandering-road documentary” that explores those who insist on finding a use for that which society casts off, whether out of necessity or activism.
  • Thursday, April 1: The Real Dirt on Farmer John (Discussion moderated by Valentine Cadieux)
    The epic tale of a maverick Midwestern farmer who transforms his farm amidst economic crisis and the difficulties of being different in rural America. Brilliantly constructed from a lifetime of documentary  footage, this funny and haunting film heralds the renewal of the Peterson family farm as a bastion of creative agriculture and one of the U.S.ʼs largest CSA farms.
  • Thursday, May 6: Julie and Julia (Discussion moderated by Tracey Deutsch and Rachel Slocum)
    Meryl Streep is Julia Child and Amy Adams is writer Julia Powell in Nora Ephron's vivid and compelling story. Julia Child discovers her gift for French cooking and writes the classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julia Powell resolves to make all 524 recipes in the book in a year, and to blog about it. Both women achieve self realization with passion, fearlessness and butter.

Funding for this series was supplied by Institute for Advanced Study, Institute for Global Studies, Department of History, Department of Geography, and Deparment of Sociology