Film Fest location: Britannia High School Auditorium. Watch for directional signs.
The Stone Soup Film Festival responds to the enormous interest in food issues these days. Environmental concerns, globalization, economic collapse are alerting us to the fragility of our food system and the urgency of action. Although the realities surrounding our current land and food systems can be disheartening, our films aim to emphasize the positive efforts being made as a way to empower the current generation to take action.
In doing so, the Stone Soup Food Film Festival aims to broaden the community’s awareness and understanding of food issues, its problems and solutions by screening both locally and internationally films on a range of themes including health and nutrition, food economics, agricultural worker rights, sustainable agriculture, and urban gardening.
This year’s Stone Soup Film Festival is presented as part of “Sustenance: Feasting on Art and Culture”, a city-wide food festival to be held from Oct 3 through 18th at the Roundhouse Community Centre and satellite community centres around the city. For more information on the Sustenance festival visit www.roundhouse.ca/sustenance
Tickets
$15 Festival Passes ~ available at Britannia Community Centre (1661 Napier St) & ‘Health on the Drive’ 1458 Commercial Drive.
Tickets at the door ~ by donation (suggested $5 - $10) for each film slot For more information contact Ian @ 604-718-5895
Film Fest location: Britannia High School Auditorium. There will be lots of direction signs.
Films and Film Schedule follows...
____________________________________________________
Saturday, October 17
11am – 1:30pm
Mad City Chickens
Directed by Tashai Lovington and Robert Lughai
78 min / 2008 / USA
Mad City Chickens is a sometimes serious, sometimes whimsical look at the people who keep urban chickens in their backyards. From chicken experts and authors to a rescued landfill hen or an inexperienced family that decides to take the poultry plunge—and even a mad scientist and giant hen taking to the streets—it’s a humorous and heartfelt trip through the world of backyard chickendom.
Witness if you will Gallus Domesticus…the backyard chicken. A mere few pounds of feather, bone, and muscle; a creature regarded by many as a rather humorous, though not so intelligent agent of food production. And yet make note of a most singular phenomenon now taking shape across suburb and city. From backyard eggs to the family’s new favorite pet, the urban chicken is forging a fresh place in the pecking order of human importance.
“Mad City Chickens is as informative as it is entertaining, and it wouldn't be surprising if more than a few audience members went home and started pricing chicks and coops.”
~ Jane Burns, The Capital Times ~
Planting the Seeds
Video by Hadas Levey
30 min / 2009 / Canada
This BC made documentary shows us the many food security projects being carried out in the rural town of Kaslo, BC. Seed savings, lawns to gardens, and canning are a few of the initiatives that we can all learn from and which are helping to build food security in this small BC town.
Speaker – Heather Havens on raising urban backyard chickens in Vancouver
____________________________________________________
2 – 4pm
Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
Directed by Faith Morgan
53 min / 2006 / USA
People's Choice Award ~ Best International Film at HYPERLINK "http://www.aeff.org.nz/"Aotearoa Environmental Film Festival
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba's economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half – and food by 80 percent – people were desperate. This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call "The Special Period." The film opens with a short history of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever. Cuba, the only country that has faced such a crisis – the massive reduction of fossil fuels – is an example of options and hope.
“We have a lot to learn form the unlikely role model. The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil,” presents a much richer portrayal of Cuba and the ways it transformed itself from oil and import dependency to a surprisingly resilient country with an economy rooted in localized food and energy production.”
One More Dead Fish (Short version of full length)
Directed and produced by Allan and Stefan Forbes
8 min / Canada
Grand Prize Winner ~ Planet in Focus Film Festival, Toronto
Bronze Award, 2005 ~ Columbus Film Festival
Official Selection ~ Seoul Human Rights Film Festival
Handliners in Nova Scotia are still desperately trying to survive, eking out a meager living on tiny quotas, while bottom trawlers rake in short-term profits, destroy the environment, catch spawning females, and discard huge amounts of fish.
One Man, One Cow, One Planet
Directed by Thomas and Barbara Burstyn
56 min / 2007 / New Zealand
One man, One Cow, One Planet exposes globalization and its mantra of infinite growth in a finite world for what it really is: an environmental and human disaster.
But across India marginal farmers are fighting back. By reviving an arcane form of agriculture, they are saving their poisoned lands and exposing the bio-colonialism of multinational corporations. One man, One Cow, One Planet tells their story through the teachings of an elderly New Zealander many are calling the new Gandhi.
What does an environmentally sustainable food system capable of feeding everyone actually look like?
One man, One Cow, One Planet is a blueprint for a post-industrial future.
This film takes you into the heart of the world's most important renaissance.
The outcome of the battle for agricultural control in India may just dictate the future of
the earth.
“I am deeply moved by the multi-layers in this film and the message of simplicity. A tremendous work of integrity and beauty and clarity”
~ Elisabeth Arlington, Harvests Magazine ~
____________________________________________________
4:30 – 7:30pm
Life and Debt Life
Directed by Stephanie Black
86 min / 2002 / USA
Best Documentary ~ Jamerican Film Festival
Special Jury Prize ~ 2004 Paris Human Rights Film Festival
Special Jury Prize ~ Festival International Du Film Insulaire, Ole De Groix
Critics Jury Award ~ West Los Angels Film Festival
Audience Award for Best Film of the Festival ~ One World 2002 Prague Human Rights Film Festival
Finalist, International Premier Award ~ One World Media Awards
Jamaica, land of sea, sand and sun. And a prime example of the complexities of
economic globalization on the world's developing countries.
Using conventional and non-conventional documentary techniques, this searing film
dissects the "mechanism of debt" that is destroying local agriculture and industry in Third World countries while substituting them with sweat-shops and cheap imports. With a voice-over narration written by Jamaica Kincaid, adapted from her non-fiction book "A
Small Place," "Life and Debt" is an unapologetic look at the "new world order" from the
point of view of Jamaican workers, farmers, government and policy officials, who see the reality of globalization from the ground up.
The documentary film includes interviews with Former Prime Minister Michael Manley,
Deputy Director of the International Monetary Fund Stanley Fischer, and short
commentary by President of Haiti-Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Former President of
Ghana-Jerry Rawlings. But the articulate voices of those impacted by the policies of
globalization are foremost.
Asparagus (Short version of full length)
Directed and Produced by Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly
6 min / 2008 / USA
Winner Best Documentary ~ Rural Route Film Festival
Winner Audience Award ~ Newburyport Film Festival
Winner Audience Award ~ Waterfront Film Festival
For 30 years, Oceana County Michigan has been the “Asparagus Capital of the World”. Now its spear-struck residents and family farms take on the U.S. War on Drugs, Free Trade and a Fast Food Nation, all to save their beloved roots.
El Contrato
Directed by Min Sook Lee
51 min / 2003/ Canada
Taureau de Platine Award - For Best Documentary, Iberoamerican Cinema Festival, Montreal
El Contrato follows Teodoro Bello Martinez, a poverty-stricken father of four living in Central Mexico, and several of his countrymen as they make an annual migration to southern Ontario. For eight months of the year the town's population absorbs 4000 migrant labourers who pick tomatoes for conditions and wages no local will accept. Under a well-meaning government program that allows growers to monitor themselves, the opportunity to exploit workers is as ripe as the fruit they pick. Grievances are deflected by a long line of others "back home" who are willing to take their place.
Despite a fear of repercussions, the workers voice their desire for dignity and respect, as much as for better working conditions. El Contrato ends as winter closes in and the Mexicans pledge, not for the first time and possibly not the last, that it's their final season in the north.
Speaker – Erika Del Carmen Fuchs, Justicia for Migrant Workers BC co-founder and member
____________________________________________________
8 – 10pm
Food Inc.
Directed by Robert Kenner
93 min / 2009 / USA
In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.
Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.
"Don't take another bite till you see Food, Inc., an essential, indelible documentary."
~ Peter Travers, Rolling Stone ~
"Does for the supermarket what 'Jaws' did for the beach."
~ John Anderson, Variety
Food Justice: A Growing Movement (short)
Directed and produced by Martina Brimmer and Zora Tucker
8 min / 2006 / USA
Deals with the issues of urban food security in relationship to systemic oppression, environmental racism, health issues and the failure of our conventional food system to support those communities that bear the consequences of social inequity. It was also their intention as activists to portray the world which they are striving to create, and so Zora and Martina focused upon several of many Bay Area grassroots projects that they consider part of the food justice movement.
Looking at the UBC Farm
Video by Linda Flechter and Jennifer Rashleigh
17 min/ Canada
This film looks at the teaching, learning, urban agriculture and community development that happens in the 24 hectare space called UBC Farm.
Speaker – discusses the prospect of saving the UBC Farm
____________________________________________________
Sunday, October 18
____________________________________________________
11am – 1pm
All Jacked Up
Directed by Jennifer Mattox
110 min / 2008 / USA
Finalist ~ 2008 DIY Film Festival
Official Selection ~ 2008 Raw Lifestyle Film Festival
All Jacked Up is an angst-driven portrait of four teenagers who discover the truth about their obsessive, addictive, and emotion-fueled eating habits. All this brought on by their parents, schools, and our abusive food system that profits from them with no regard to their well-being. HYPERLINK "http://www.alljackedupmovie.com/about_cast.htm" Melissa, Raquel, Michael and Danny are typical teens with mainstream lifestyles and eating habits. With the help of a curious narrator, they discover what lies beneath their exploitation and how to confront it. Teen emotional and physical conditions are examined by noted experts as the film uncovers an apparent conspiracy that works against the health of an entire generation. The film’s characters are led on a journey of discovery – they are challenged to recognize their detrimental underlying issues. HYPERLINK "http://www.alljackedupmovie.com/about_experts.htm" With the help of experts, and guidance from their peers, they are presented simple solutions to deal with their problems. The HYPERLINK "http://www.alljackedupmovie.com/index.htm" http://www.alljackedupmovie.com/index.htmteens are challenged to come to grips with their harmful lifestyles and what their unhealthy future holds. In a climate where media attention is primarily on childhood obesity, Director, HYPERLINK "http://www.alljackedupmovie.com/filmmakers.htm" Jennifer Mattox looks at the bigger picture – a system that preys upon consumer innocence in the name of profit. The filmmakers make a direct connection between what teens eat and their behavior and emotions. This frank and witty look at what’s really going on inside the bodies, hearts and minds of the teen generation is a wake up call for them to stand up and demand change.
"The teenage bond with the world of fast food in all its variants is explored in this lively but hard-hitting exposé that brings animation, dramatization, comedy, and the testimony of experts in the fields of nutrition, food science, and psychology into play."
~ The Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL ~
Ripe For Change (short version of full length)
Directed by Emiko Omori
8 min / 2006 / USA
This great little short about the edible schoolyard initiative in Berkeley as well as learn about the transformation of public education to include stronger cultural and societal values.
____________________________________________________
1:30 -3pm
The Real Dirt on Farmer John
Directed by Taggart Siegel
83 min / 2006 / USA
Plus winner of 25 other international film festivals
The epic tale of a maverick Midwestern farmer. An outcast in his community, Farmer John bravely stands amidst a failing economy, vicious rumors, and violence. By melding the traditions of family farming with the power of art and free expression, this powerful story of transformation and renewal heralds a resurrection of farming in America. The film is a haunting odyssey, capturing what it means to be different in rural America.
Director Taggart Siegel HYPERLINK "http://collectiveeye.org/index.html" \t "_blank" Collective Eye made the film in a most unusual way – shooting farmer John Peterson over 25-years of their evolving friendship, and using multiple media, from 8 mm home movies shot on the farm in the 50’s and 60’s to modern video -- allowing him to capture his alternately humorous, heartbreaking and spirited life with raw drama and intimacy. With the death of his father during the late 60s, a teenaged John takes over the traditional family farm, slowly turning it into an experiment of art and agriculture, making it a haven for hippies, radicals and artists. The Real Dirt on Farmer John charts the end of this idealistic era as the farm debt crisis of the 80’s brings about the tragic collapse of the farm. Defying all odds, he gradually transforms his land into a revolutionary farming community, a cultural mecca, where people work and flourish providing fresh vegetables and herbs to thousands of people every week. The Peterson family farm has become Angelic Organics, one of the largest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms in the United States, a beacon of today’s booming organic farming movement.
"Inspiring....outstanding documentary...an intimacy unimaginable in most nonfiction
films."
~ Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times ~
“This is a loving, moving, inspiring, quirky documentary...visionaries like Peterson are finding a way back to the land. “
~ Roger Ebert ~
Homegrown Revolution (short)
Directed by Robert McFalls
10 min / 2008 / USA
Official Selection ~ Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival
Official Selection~ St. Louis International Film Festival
Official Selection~ Cleveland International Film festival
Jules Dervaes and his three adult children have been growing their own food, and working to live off the grid for nearly a decade. Their urban homestead located in Pasadena is both a revolution in living and a model for self-sufficiency.
The short film documents how the Dervaes have transformed 1/10 of an acre, which used to include a driveway, into a 6,000 pound urban garden that offers up 350 types of useful and edible plants each year. They use every inch of space, which includes vertical gardening, and during the summer are able to provide up to 80 percent of their food needs. During the winter it’s about 50 percent. In contrast, their lawn growing neighbors have little to show for their own patches of earth just 130 feet from the freeway.
A Well Watered Garden
Directed and produced by
12 min / / Canada,
____________________________________________________
3:30 – 6pm
My Big Fat Diet
Directed by Mary Bissell
42 min / 2008 / Canada
If you visit Alert Bay off the coast of Vancouver Island, you'll find a picturesque fishing village inhabited by two cultures, the Namgis First Nation and their non-native neighbours. Here an epidemic is undermining the health and vitality of community. Like most aboriginal communities across North America, the rates of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes here are up to five times the national average. Mainstream medical professionals cite sedentary lifestyles and a diet rich in fat as the underlying reason for the growing epidemic
After two decades of service in public health, Métis physician, Dr. Jay Wortman, believes that the western diet which replaced the traditional diet is the primary cause of the epidemic. "Obesity, diabetes and heart disease were unknown in these populations until very recently. No aboriginal language has a word for diabetes."
Wortman's conviction comes from personal experience. Four years ago, he discovered that he had type 2 diabetes. "My immediate instinctive response was to stop eating any food that caused my blood sugar to rise. So I eliminated carbohydrates from my diet. Within four weeks, my blood sugar and blood pressure had normalized and I began to feel much better."
My Big, Fat Diet chronicles how the Namgis First Nation goes cold turkey and gives up sugar and junk food for a year in a diet study sponsored by Health Canada and the University of British Columbia. Through the stories of six people, it documents a medical and cultural experiment that may be the first of its kind in North America.
Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 days
88 min / 2008 / USA
Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days is an independent documentary film that chronicles six Americans with diabetes who switch to a diet consisting entirely of vegan, organic, uncooked food in order to reverse disease without pharmaceutical medication. The six are challenged to give up meat, dairy, sugar, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, soda, junk food, fast food, processed food, packaged food, and even cooked food for 30 days. The film follows each participant's remarkable journey and captures the medical, physical, and emotional transformations brought on by this radical diet and lifestyle change. We witness moments of struggle, support, and hope as what is revealed, with startling clarity, is that diet can reverse disease and change lives. The film highlights each of the six before they begin the program and we first meet them in their home environment with their families. Each participant speaks candidly about their struggle to manage their diabetes and how it has affected every aspect of their life, from work to home to their relationships.
____________________________________________________
6:30 - 9:30pm
The Garden
Directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy
95 min / 2009 / USA
Academy Award Nominee – Best Documentary feature
Winner ~ Silverdocs, AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival
Nominee ~ IDA Pare Lorentz Award
Official Selection ~ LA Film Fest
Official Selection ~DOXA Film Festival
The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.
The Garden follows the plight of the farmers, from the tilled soil of this urban farm to the polished marble of City Hall. Mostly immigrants from Latin America, from countries where they feared for their lives if they were to speak out, we watch them organize, fight back, and demand answers:
Why was the land sold to a wealthy developer for millions less than fair-market value? Why was the transaction done in a closed-door session of the LA City Council? Why has it never been made public?
And the powers-that-be have the same response: “The garden is wonderful, but there is nothing more we can do.”
If everyone told you nothing more could be done, would you give up?
”The Garden has the pulse of verité with the narrative pull of fiction, telling the story of the country’s largest urban farm, backroom deals, land developers, green politics, money, poverty, power, and racial discord. The film explores and exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.”
~ The Gene Siskel Film Center ~
The Urban Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project
Directed by Andrew Nguyen
8 min / 2009 / Canada
This short highlights the work of this unique community garden project run out of the UBC Farm. This project works with people who have become disconnected from their home communities and tries to reconnect them with the Earth by being a bridge between what is healthy in modern culture and traditional culture
Indigenous Plant Diva
Directed by Kamala Todd
10 min / 2008 / Canada
In the language of the Squamish Nation, Cease Wyss was given the name 'T'Uy'Tanat', meaning "Woman who travels by canoe to gather medicines for all people." In director Kamala Todd's lyrical portrait, Wyss reveals the remarkable healing powers of plants growing among the sprawling urban streets of downtown Vancouver.
Speakers – Cease Wyss, Squamish First Nation and Plant Diva, Kamala Todd, film director, Indigenous Plant Diva Mary Holms, Coordinator of the Urban Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project
