Film Series Information

The Heartland Food Film Series will take place in the Alumni theatre at 7pm Monday April 27th through to Thursday April 30th. There will be a discussion after each film to talk about the issues that it raises and what is going on at a local level.

Admission is by donation. All procedes for the film series will be split between Heartland Quality Foods and the Kamloops Food Bank.

Monday – “Pas de pays sans paysans” or “The Fight for True Farming” (french with English subtittles)

Tuesday – “Hijacked Future”
Wednesday – “Mad Cow Sacred Cow”
Thursday – “Food Fight, the documentary”

The Fight for True Farming (90 mins)
In this documentary, crop and animal farmers in Quebec, the Canadian West, the US Northeast and France offer solutions to the social and environmental scourges of factory farming. Driven by the forces of globalization, rampant agribusiness is harming the environmemt and threatening the survival of farms. The proliferation of GMO crops is a further threat to biodiversity as well as to farmers’ autonomy. In Europe as well as North America, a current of resistance bringing together farmers and consumers insists that it is possible–indeed imperative–to grow food differently. The Fight for True Farming is a film of grim lucidity but also irrepressible hope.
Hijacked Future, http://www.hijackedfuture.com/index.html,
Eating breakfast toast: a simple ritual to start the day.  The bread
probably came from a bakery or grocery store, but beyond that who knows
where the wheat came from ­ never mind the seeds that grew the wheat. Do we
need to know? A new documentary, ³Hijacked Future² says yes, because those
seeds that became the toast you ate this morning are being hijacked – right
into a looming world food security catastrophe.

While our industrial system of agriculture is providing abundance and
variety today, this Global Currents documentary warns us that it¹s an
unsustainable system that will not be able to nourish and provide for us and
our grandchildren in the future. It¹s a system that literally runs on oil,
from fertilizers and pesticides, to the trucks and planes that transport
food. And the source of our food ­ seeds ­ is being hijacked by a handful of
corporations from the farmers who have for millennia, grown and saved them.

The documentary looks at the increasingly fragile base of our North American
industrial food system in order to bring all of us consumers of food to a
better understanding of just what¹s at stake with our daily bread. It asks
us to question the wisdom of a system precariously based on oil and
corporate seeds while we¹re at the same time witnessing the impact of
climate change.

Mad Cow Sacred Cow, 52 minutes,
http://madcowsacredcow.wordpress.com/watch-the-trailer/
Terrified of his food, filmmaker Anand Ramayya (Cosmic Current) embarks on a
journey that reveals shocking connections between the Mad Cow crisis, Farm
crisis and Global Food crisis.

Ramayya realizes that the cow is not only his favourite meal but also the
God of his Hindu ancestors and the livelihood of his Canadian in-laws, who
are small farmers.
With a sense of humour and curiosity, Ramayya embarks on a journey to learn
more about the modern Mad Cow and ancient Sacred Cow in hopes that their
stories will reveal a solution to his fear of food. The journey takes him
from his in-laws¹ family farm all the way back to India, land of the Sacred
Cow. Ironically, modern India is also home to a burgeoning meat export
industry that threatens to destroy an agricultural economy centered around
the Sacred Cow and critical to the livelihood of 65% of India¹s population.

Globalization emerges as a re-occurring character in this journey, revealing
a world gone mad, an ecological crisis, religious fundamentalism, a farmer
suicide epidemic and record breaking economic growth contrasted by
staggering disparity.
Is the way we eat connected to all this?
Mad Cow Sacred Cow is a universal story that connects the food we eat to the
environmental, cultural, economic and health crises we are currently facing
on a global level.

The Food Fight, 2009, 83 minutes, www.foodfightthedoc.com, just won Best Documentary at the Houston Worldfest International Film Festival (this week!)
When we walk into a supermarket, we assume that we have the widest possible
choice of healthy foods. But in fact, over the course of the 20th century,
our food system has been co-opted by corporate forces whose interests do not
lie in providing the public with fresh, healthy and sustainably-produced
food.

Fortunately for America, an alternative emerged from the counter-culture of
California in the last 1960¹s and early 1970¹s, where a group of political
anti-corporate protesters ­ led by Alice Waters ­ voiced their dissent by
creating a food chain outside of the conventional system.  The unintended
result was the birth of a vital local-sustainable-organic food movement,
which has brought back taste and variety to our tables.

Food Fight is a fascinating look at how American agricultural policy and
food culture developed in the 20th century and how the California food
movement has created a counter-revolution against big agribusiness.

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