<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">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. <br>
<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">The Cinematheque also features special presentations, multiple films centered on a certain genre, or a film director, or theme, country, or other category.<br>
<br>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.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">
The list of films, all about the world's food supply, agricultural production, diet, and medical health, is in the announcement below. <br><br>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. <br>
<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">Also, the <i>films</i> 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.<br>
<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">CHUCK<br>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><span style="font-size:5.5pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:rgb(153,0,0)"><br></span></i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><span style="font-size:5.5pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:rgb(153,0,0)">===================================</span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><span style="font-size:5.5pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:rgb(153,0,0)">CHUCK SEARCY<br>
International Advisor, Project RENEW</span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><span style="font-size:5.5pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:rgb(153,0,0)">Vice President, Veterans for
Peace Chapter 160 (Hoa Binh)<br>
71 Tran Quoc Toan, Hanoi, Vietnam <br>
Tel: +844 6684 2622 <br>
Mobile: +849 0342 0769 <br>
Skype: <span style> </span> chucksearcy <br>
Email: <span style> </span> <a href="mailto:chucksearcy@yahoo.com" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(153,0,0);text-decoration:none">chuckusvn@gmail.com </span></a><br>
Web:<span style> </span><a href="http://www.landmines.org.vn"><span style="color:rgb(153,0,0);text-decoration:none">www.landmines.org.vn</span></a> <a href="mailto:chucksearcy@yahoo.com" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(153,0,0);text-decoration:none"><br>
</span></a>===================================</span></i></b></p>
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<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Hanoi Cinematheque</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:hanoicinema22@gmail.com">hanoicinema22@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 3:38 PM<br>Subject: Food, Inc.<br>To: <a href="mailto:chuckusvn@gmail.com">chuckusvn@gmail.com</a><br><br><br>Dear Member:<br>
<br>
Next week we present four outstanding documentaries concerning current threats to our world food supply.<br>
<br>
For reservations, reply to this e-mail, or phone to Hanoi Cinematheque between 14:30 – 21:00. (Tel: 3936 2648)<br>
<br>
<br>
December 10 Tuesday<br>
19:00 FOOD, INC.<br>
21:00 VANISHING OF THE BEES<br>
<br>
December 11 Wednesday<br>
19:00 VANISHING OF THE BEES<br>
21:00 FOOD, INC.<br>
<br>
December 12 Thursday<br>
19:00 GENETIC CHILE<br>
20:15 A PLACE AT THE TABLE<br>
<br>
December 13 Friday<br>
19:00 A PLACE AT THE TABLE<br>
20:30 GENETIC CHILE<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
FILM NOTES<br>
<br>
<br>
FOOD, INC.<br>
2008 Directed by Robert Kenner 91 minutes<br>
English only. No Vietnamese translation<br>
<br>
2010 Academy Award nominee: Best Documentary Feature<br>
<br>
<br>
Review by Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times::<br>
<br>
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<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Suffice it to say, after the film's disturbing glimpses inside the meat<br>
industry, along with its blunt indictment of fast food giants, you'll think<br>
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.<br>
<br>
The film also gives an eloquent array of writers, activists and farmers time to<br>
enlighten us about the perils on our plates, but not without offering hope for a<br>
safer future. FOOD, INC. is essential viewing.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Review by Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine:<br>
<br>
Eating can be one dangerous business. Don't take another bite till you see<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Review by Andrew O’Heir, Salon.com:<br>
<br>
On one hand, we've got the fact that, as Michael Pollan puts it, the production<br>
of food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous<br>
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<br>
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.<br>
<br>
This change has had obvious benefits for consumers, a point that leftists,<br>
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<br>
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<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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,<br>
college-educated folks in coastal cities and college towns, you're probably<br>
right.<br>
<br>
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<br>
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.<br>
<br>
An engaging and often wrenching film, FOOD, INC. covers a wide range of<br>
material, including the horrific, the humorous and the exemplary. Kenner<br>
explores cases of E. coli poisoning (from tainted ground beef); the factory<br>
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.<br>
<br>
The agitprop line of attack in FOOD, INC. is twofold. First, the film seeks to<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
Published on Sunday, February 7, 2010 by The Times/UK:<br>
<br>
Why Food Inc. Should Make Us All Retch<br>
by Charles Clover<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Yet feed lots have crept into Italy. American pork producers, such as Smithfield, now have vast operations in Poland and Romania.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
VANISHING OF THE BEES<br>
2010 Directed by George Langworthy and Maryam Henein 87 minutes<br>
English only. Narrated by Ellen Page.<br>
<br>
Honeybees have been mysteriously disappearing across the planet, literally vanishing from their hives.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
Review by Jennie Kermode, EyeForFilm, U.K.:<br>
<br>
"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
As those working in the industry approach panic, this documentary asks what's going on.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Quotes from the Press:<br>
<br>
“The most important documentary film since An Inconvenient Truth.”?<br>
---Filmstar<br>
<br>
“An essential documentary…If you like eating, see this film.”?<br>
--- Channel 4, London<br>
<br>
“Powerfully argued and very timely.”?<br>
--- Sunday Times<br>
<br>
“Be advised, this is more than a documentary”?<br>
--- The Independent (London)<br>
<br>
“Alarming enough to convince you that this is an issue that needs action at the highest level.”?<br>
--- The Daily Express<br>
<br>
“This Bee Movie has a real sting.”?<br>
--- The Times (London)<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
A PLACE AT THE TABLE<br>
2012 Directed by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush 84 minutes<br>
English with English subtitles<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
Review by Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times:<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
GENETIC CHILE<br>
2010 Directed by Christopher Dudley 60 minutes<br>
English only<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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