[Ngo-sanrm] Fwd: Food, Inc.

Mon Dec 9 09:49:28 GMT 2013

Many of us enjoy the Hanoi Cinematheque as a wonderful place to see the
finest international films made in the past 75 years, including an
excellent library of Vietnamese films as well.  Many of the screenings are
subtitled in Vietnamese or English or the most appropriate translation.

The Cinematheque also features special presentations, multiple films
centered on a certain genre, or a film director, or theme, country, or
other category.

This week a series of films will be shown which will be of great interest
to members of the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resources Management
(SANRM) Working Group.

The list of films, all about the world's food supply, agricultural
production, diet, and medical health, is in the announcement below.

Unfortunately, this announcement is in English only.  If anyone in the
Working Group knows a friend or organization that would be interested in
these films, please inform them -- and if anyone would like to undertake a
quick translation of this announcement, all the better.

Also, the *films* are in English only.  It might be possible in the future
to have them translated, if members of the SANRM Working Group feel that
the value of showing them to a larger Vietnamese audience is significant
enough.  For now, though, the films will be presented in English.

CHUCK

*===================================*

*CHUCK SEARCY International Advisor, Project RENEW*

*Vice President, Veterans for Peace Chapter 160 (Hoa Binh) 71 Tran Quoc
Toan, Hanoi, Vietnam Tel:           +844 6684 2622  Mobile:     +849 0342
0769  Skype:       chucksearcy Email:        chuckusvn at gmail.com
<chucksearcy at yahoo.com> Web:          www.landmines.org.vn
<http://www.landmines.org.vn>
<chucksearcy at yahoo.com>===================================*

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hanoi Cinematheque <hanoicinema22 at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 3:38 PM
Subject: Food, Inc.
To: chuckusvn at gmail.com

Dear Member:

Next week we present four outstanding documentaries concerning current
threats to our world food supply.

For reservations, reply to this e-mail, or phone to Hanoi Cinematheque
between 14:30 – 21:00. (Tel: 3936 2648)

December 10  Tuesday
        19:00   FOOD, INC.
        21:00   VANISHING OF THE BEES

December 11  Wednesday
        19:00   VANISHING OF THE BEES
        21:00   FOOD, INC.

December 12  Thursday
        19:00   GENETIC CHILE
        20:15   A PLACE AT THE TABLE

December 13  Friday
        19:00   A PLACE AT THE TABLE
        20:30   GENETIC CHILE

FILM NOTES

FOOD, INC.
2008    Directed by Robert Kenner     91 minutes
English only.  No Vietnamese translation

2010 Academy Award nominee: Best Documentary Feature

     Review by Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times::

Thanks to the smart, expertly shot documentary FOOD, INC., I now know why
it's so hard to find a supermarket tomato that tastes like, well, a tomato.
That's
because tomatoes, like so much of our food, aren't farmed or grown as much
as they are engineered to satisfy rigid corporate and economic mandates.

And don't get producer-director Robert Kenner started on beef, chicken,
pork or that No. 1 public enemy: corn -- the manipulated mass production of
each is concisely and rivetingly scrutinized here.

Suffice it to say, after the film's disturbing glimpses inside the meat
industry, along with its blunt indictment of fast food giants, you'll think
twice before eating just about anything nonorganic. This is, of course, a
good -- and doable -- thing, even if the handful of multinational companies
that control the bulk of our nation's food supply won't be thrilled with
Kenner's vivid portrayal of their near-Orwellian methods of doing business.
The U.S. government doesn't get off scot-free here either.

The film also gives an eloquent array of writers, activists and farmers
time to
enlighten us about the perils on our plates, but not without offering hope
for a
safer future. FOOD, INC. is essential viewing.

     Review by Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine:

Eating can be one dangerous business. Don't take another bite till you see
Robert Kenner's FOOD, INC., an essential, indelible documentary that is
scarier than anything in the last five Saw horror shows. Decepticons have
nothing on ears of corn when it comes to transforming into mutant killers.

Kenner keeps his film bouncing with humor, music and graphics. Just like
the ads that shove junk food down our faces. The message he's delivering
with the help of nutrition activists, including Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food
Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore's Dilemma”), is an eye-opener.
High-fructose corn syrup and its friend the E.coli virus are declaring war
on national health, and federal agencies, lobbied by Big Agriculture, ain't
doing a thing to stop it. Reason? Profits. The movie offers solid
alternatives. If the way to an audience's heart is through its stomach,
FOOD, INC. is a movie you're going to love.”

     Review by Andrew O’Heir, Salon.com:

On one hand, we've got the fact that, as Michael Pollan puts it, the
production
of food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous
10,000. With the massive application of fertilizers, pesticides and
economies of scale after World War II, raising crops and animals for food
ceased to be a
rural lifestyle based on many small farmers and ranchers, and rapidly
became a heavily mechanized (and lightly regulated) industry dominated by a
handful of big companies who run on low-wage labor. FOOD, INC. attempts to
lift the veil of secrecy from this process. In one remarkable example
Pollan provides, the meat in a single fast-food burger might have come from
400 different cows.

This change has had obvious benefits for consumers, a point that leftists,
foodies and environmentalists sometimes overlook but that Kenner's film
takes pains to notice. While chronic food shortages threaten the poor of
Africa and South Asia with starvation, food in America is plentiful,
various and
exceptionally cheap. (Expressed as a proportion of the average family's
budget, food prices have fallen by half in 30 years.) In the movie, Kenner
spends some
time with a working-class Latino family who say they simply don't spend
enough time at home together to shop or cook. While dropping the kids at
school and then driving themselves to work, Mom and Dad can feed the whole
family at Burger King -- for about $11.

Locavores and organic mavens like Pollan or pioneering chef Alice Waters
have long argued that the American diet is unhealthy, wasteful of resources
and ecologically destructive. But for the vast majority of working
Americans, the low prices achieved by the mass-market food industry
outweigh their arguments.

As anyone knows who has made the switch, organic and locally produced food
comes with sticker shock. Although the organic sector of the market is
growing rapidly, it only represents about 3 percent of the total food
market. If you surmise that that 3 percent correlates strongly with
upper-middle-class,
college-educated folks in coastal cities and college towns, you're probably
right.

Although FOOD, INC. will inevitably be compared to AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
(and there are undeniable similarities), it actually represents an earlier
stage in the activist process. The latter film used a well-known public
figure to
galvanize widespread opinion on an issue that was becoming mainstream.
FOOD, INC. is meant to be an opening salvo that gets people's attention,
not the battle that wins the war.

An engaging and often wrenching film, FOOD, INC. covers a wide range of
material, including the horrific, the humorous and the exemplary. Kenner
explores cases of E. coli poisoning (from tainted ground beef); the factory
farming methods that have produced more, fatter and faster-growing farm
animals; and Monsanto's genetically patented, pesticide-proof corn and
soybeans that have given them monopoly power over those crops. But he also
shows us how far the organic-corporate rapprochement has come, introduces
us to a western Virginia rancher who produces natural, grass-fed livestock
(the movie's most appealing character) and rides along as Walmart buyers
visit a Stonyfield Farms organic dairy.

The agitprop line of attack in FOOD, INC. is twofold. First, the film seeks
to
cast doubt on the low price of American food, and suggest that a food
production system that is so destructive to human health, the lives of
captive animals, its own workers and the environment is far more expensive
than it seems to be. Secondly, Kenner and his collaborators want to argue
that consumer choice -- often derided by social-change activists as passive
and ineffective -- can be a powerful instrument in this case.

     Published on Sunday, February 7, 2010 by The Times/UK:

Why Food Inc. Should Make Us All Retch
by Charles Clover

A two-year-old boy called Kevin ate a hamburger on holiday with his family.
Ten days later he died, his organs overwhelmed by a mutant form of the E
coli bacterium found mostly in feed lots or so-called concentrated
animal-feeding operations - vast animal-fattening centres, without a blade
of grass, where cattle stand up to their ankles in muck all day. These are
where America now produces much of its beef.

Robert Kenner's film FOOD INC, follows Kevin's mother, Barbara Kowalcyk,
though the offices of Capitol Hill as she lobbies politicians to pass
Kevin's Law. This would re-empower the US regulator, the Food and Drug
Administration, to close down meat processors that regularly distribute
contaminated meat. It is amazing that it does not have these powers, or
rather that they have been taken away by industry lobbying. It turns out
that many of the people who sit, or sat, at the head of the FDA came from
the industry it is supposed to be regulating.

There is no doubt that FOOD INC - based on Eric Schlosser's Fast Food
Nation and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma - is a powerful and
forensic film with an unerring eye for human stories about the cruel US
industrial food system, which abuses animals and workers in many ways.

British audiences, however appalled, are bound to look away and say: it
can't be that bad here, can it? They will be right, up to a point. There
are no British equivalents of the feed-lot operations that turn subsidised
maize into meat that sells for less than vegetables. We have banned growth
hormones and still rear most of our cows on grass. Our regulators are
independent and have not so obviously been corrupted by political and legal
appointments.

Yet feed lots have crept into Italy. American pork producers, such as
Smithfield, now have vast operations in Poland and Romania.

There are signs that the downside of super-efficient, globalised
agriculture is coming our way: it's already within importing range of our
supermarkets. The film may just be, as Schlosser put it drily to me last
week, a preview of coming attractions.

The beef, chicken and most processed food found in American supermarkets
all have one thing in common: they depend on cheap subsidised maize, which
Americans call corn. The United States subsidises maize in disgraceful
ways, just as the European Union used to subsidise other commodity crops.
Subsidies encourage the use of fertilisers, boost carbon emissions and skew
the whole American agricultural system to make the unhealthiest calories
the cheapest.

Yet, I hear you saying, this maize dependency is an American phenomenon.
And isn't industrial agriculture the price that has to be paid for feeding
the world? Well, maybe - but I know representatives of British farming who
have emerged from the film pretty shocked by what could happen to them at
the hands of the monopolistic agri-industrial corporations that are the
villains of Kenner's film. We see big chicken processors enslaving
smallholders by insisting on constant "improvements" that keep them in
debt. We see big companies exploiting immigrant workers. We see
investigators hired by Monsanto prosecuting farmers suspected of keeping
patented genetically modified seed for re-use the following year. For
farmers, this is scary.

And for the rest of us? We have just a slim chance in global markets to
influence our future. We can vote three meal times a day by using our power
as consumers to promote the kind of local, sustainable food that we want.

But those of us who call for proper food increasingly face the accusation
from advocates of intensive agriculture that we are being unrealistic and
elitist, because only the rich have the luxury of fussing about the
provenance of their food; the poor just need to eat.

FOOD, INC. strikes this argument a killer blow. The camera follows a
Mexican-American family around southern California. The quietly articulate
father has diabetes. The mother explains that she would like to cook her
children healthy meals, not give them hamburgers, but she has no time
because she works long hours and they cannot afford it. You can buy a
double cheeseburger for 99 cents. You will pay more than that for a head of
broccoli. American industrial agriculture makes the poor the most likely to
become obese and get diabetes.

Kenners film argues persuasively that it is ordinary working people who are
the real victims of America's super-efficient, industrial form of
agriculture. The rich will always eat what they want.

It follows that we in Europe should be vigilant against Food Inc slipping
in by the back door. We should try actively to prevent Food Inc becoming
Food Ltd.
As Schlosser puts it: if you see someone ahead being clubbed, you don't go
further down the alley. His point is well made. I recommend you see this
film.

VANISHING OF THE BEES
2010     Directed by George Langworthy and Maryam Henein  87 minutes
English only.  Narrated by Ellen Page.

Honeybees have been mysteriously disappearing across the planet, literally
vanishing from their hives.

Known as Colony Collapse Disorder, this phenomenon has brought beekeepers
to crisis in an industry responsible for producing apples, broccoli,
watermelon, onions, cherries and a hundred other fruits and vegetables.
Commercial honeybee operations pollinate crops that make up one out of
every three bites of food on our tables.

VANISHING OF THE BEES follows commercial beekeepers David Hackenberg and
Dave Mendes as they strive to keep their bees healthy and fulfill
pollination contracts across the U.S. The film explores the struggles they
face as the two friends plead their case on Capital Hill and travel across
the Pacific Ocean in the quest to protect their honeybees.

Filming across the US, in Europe, Australia and Asia, this documentary
examines the alarming disappearance of honeybees and the greater meaning it
holds about the relationship between mankind and mother earth. As
scientists puzzle over the cause, organic beekeepers indicate alternative
reasons for this tragic loss. Conflicting options abound and after years of
research, a definitive answer has not been found to this harrowing mystery.

     Review by Jennie Kermode, EyeForFilm, U.K.:

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only
have four years of life left."

So said Albert Einstein, one of numerous great thinkers to have pondered on
the lives of these industrious insects, which have been celebrated
throughout human history. In Einstein's time, though, those words were idle
speculation - today they sound like dire prophecy. Over the past few years,
right across the US and Europe and in isolated pockets elsewhere, honeybees
have begun to vanish. For the most part, we don't even find their bodies.
Their hives are full of food but their untended young are starving; they
simply don't come back.

As those working in the industry approach panic, this documentary asks
what's going on.

Pinning down the truth behind the fate of the bees isn't easy. There don't
seem to be any simple answers. It's refreshing to see a documentary which
doesn't oversimplify the science or the political issues related to it.
Instead the complex situation is carefully explained, along with concerns
about where there are gaps in available information and how they might be
filled. The argument takes time to build and only occasionally gets
diverted into New Age sentiment. It's well substantiated and is delivered
with wit and occasional humour by a fantastic cast of beekeepers and
related tradespeople, who feel passionately about the issues involved.

VANISHING OF THE BEES has a gripping story to tell and will soon have you
feeling as passionate as its subjects do. For the most part it is diligent
and insightful, it's never patronising, and it delivers a very direct
message about the things you can do to help.

Just one word of warning - make sure you have some honey at home before you
go to see the film, because you'll be craving it when you come back.

     Quotes from the Press:

“The most important documentary film since An Inconvenient Truth.”?
        ---Filmstar

“An essential documentary…If you like eating, see this film.”?
        --- Channel 4, London

“Powerfully argued and very timely.”?
        --- Sunday Times

“Be advised, this is more than a documentary”?
        --- The Independent (London)

“Alarming enough to convince you that this is an issue that needs action at
the highest level.”?
        --- The Daily Express

“This Bee Movie has a real sting.”?
        --- The Times (London)

A PLACE AT THE TABLE
2012     Directed by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush   84 minutes
English with English subtitles

In a country with an overabundance of food, why are there an estimated 49
million Americans who do not know where their next meal is coming from? A
PLACE AT THE TABLE, a documentary directed by Kristi Jacobson and Lori
Silverbush, seeks answers by going directly to the people involved –
Washington lawmakers, authors, economists, and, above all, the people who
are hurting.

     Review by Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times:

In the essential documentary A PLACE AT THE TABLE, co-directors Kristi
Jacobson and Lori Silverbush effectively touch on a wide range of
intersecting issues that contribute to one startling statistic: One in six
Americans is unsure where their next meal will come from.

The filmmakers vividly illustrate the power and depth of the long-spiraling
problem of "food insecurity" by immersing us in the hardscrabble lives of a
cross section of our nation's poor. Whether it's Barbie, a single
Philadelphia mother of two; Rosie, a Colorado fifth-grader sharing a
cramped home with her parents and grandparents; or Tremonica, an overweight
and underfed 7-year-old from Mississippi; they're all products of a
sociopolitical system riddled with head-scratching contradiction and
conflict over the plight of hunger.

In addition to such compellingly real moments as young Rosie's story about
daydreaming of food and Tremonica's devoted teacher introducing her needy
students to the wonders of honeydew melon, the film provides pointed input
from a variety of hunger experts and advocates including actor Jeff
Bridges, "Top Chef's" Tom Colicchio (Silverbush's husband) and nutrition
policy leader Marion Nestle.

Though the big question remains — that is, how can so many Americans exist
without enough to eat in a country with more than enough food? — "Table"
could prove a vital tool in the campaign toward a widespread solution.

GENETIC CHILE
2010     Directed by Christopher Dudley     60 minutes
English only

An eye-opening look at the world of genetically modified foods through the
lens of New Mexico's iconic chile pepper. The chile pepper defines New
Mexican cuisine and is considered a sacred plant by many cultures.

Despite overwhelming evidence of gene flow, persistent safety questions,
predatory multinational agribusiness corporations and potential economic
damage, the State of New Mexico funded research to produce a GMO chile,
which is a first time for a US state. Because the funding is public,
filmmaker Chris Dudley, was able to force a rare interview with a genetic
researcher at New Mexico State University. This film is packed with
information about the harmful use of GMO technology and the ignorance shown
by the proponents of GMO crops.
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