Films will be available to screen for 24 hours beginning 12:00 AM EDT of the listed date
EVENT: Closing Party
Come dance with festival-goers to music curated by Kadallah Burrowes, This immersive party will connect you with one another to close out the 2021 FoodxFilm Festival.
Featuring compilations from Tech Tonic (Nairobi, Kenya) by HEKA and We Gazed Into Antimatter (Bambupelo Art Shrine, Nairobi, Kenya) by Mbora (Bore-RAH) the Explorer.
EVENT: Mission-Driven Games - Developing Games for A Better World
Join Lauren Ruffin (Producing Director), Christopher Hibma (Festival Director) and Lual Mayen (Game Curator) for a conversation about how games can be a tool for good and how they can impart empathy. Come hear about Lual’s personal journey from South Sudan to Uganda to Washington DC as well as his mission to develop games that are not only entertaining, but also avenues to support refugees around the world. Plus, Lual will demo his new game, Salaam.
Salaam is a high-tension runner game that puts a player in the shoes of a refugee forced to flee a war-torn region. The game starts with a caravan of refugees making their way to safety. The setting is peaceful, yet still dire, given the circumstances. Parents carrying their children and the elderly keep up with the group the best they can. Salaam puts the player in the shoes of a refugee to teach them the difficulties that displaced people face all over the world, such as lack of food, water, and medicine. Whenever a player purchases food, water, or medicine in Salaam, proceeds will be sent to help refugees in the real world.
AUDIO THEATER (Encore Performance): Soupy Salty Sonic
By Marina Zurkow & Anna Rose Hopkins
Encore Performance: Audio Theatre
A commission of the FoodxFilm Festival
Watch the archival recording now!
Zurkow and Hopkins present an encore performance of their immersive work, which premiered on Sunday, September 26. Structured as a two-voiced guided meditation, this multi-sensory, experiential work offers the listener affection, sensuality, and affinity for the fluidity of the oceans—and their imperiled state. The work invites listeners to imaginatively morph, dis/orient and to literally envision becoming ocean; lose one’s human edges; and experience embodied benthic life as a variety of non-human creatures—from sea cucumber to whale to marine snow.
EVENT: Young Filmmaker Awards Ceremony
Hosted by Blessyn Kure
Last Spring, the World Food Forum and Videos for Change asked young filmmakers, “Do you have a story to tell? One that can inspire and change the future of food? Can you create a video that builds empathy and inspires action on a food-system-related topic?” The stories that emerged can change the world. Share in the excitement when winning filmmakers receive their awards.
World Food Forum’s International Short Film Competition: Films for a Better Food Future
CLOSING SERIES: The Next Thing You Eat
Director: Morgan Neville
Docu-Series | 2021 | US | 3 episodes (32 minutes/each) | English
US Premiere
Presented by Hulu
#cellbasedprotein #pandemic #restaurant #futureoffood
From chef David Chang and Academy Award–winning documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville, The Next Thing You Eat is a six-episode docu-series that explores the seismic changes happening all around us and what they mean for the way we'll eat in the future. The Festival premieres three episodes for US audiences including Sushi, Restaurants, and 2050. Chang and a diverse cast of characters dive headfirst into what lies ahead, including everything from robots, to lab-grown fish, to insect farms, to artificial intelligence calling all the shots.
FILM: Wild Relatives
Director: Jumana Manna
Documentary | Palestine | 2018 | 64 minutes | Arabic, English | English subtitles
#seeds #syria #lebanon #arctic #palestine #futurefood
As the Syrian revolution devolved into a blood-drenched armed conflict, an agricultural seed bank was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in 2012. The process of rebuilding their collection began, using back-up seeds from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—located in Norway right beneath the Arctic permafrost. Documenting travel between Lebanon and Norway, Wild Relatives is a series of encounters that uncovers a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. The film captures the articulation of this large-scale international initiative and its localized implementation in the Bekaa Valley, carried out primarily by young migrant women. As witnessed through the journey of these seeds, a meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, climate change and biodiversity, and industrial and organic approaches to seed saving.
FILM: The Ants and the Grasshopper
Director: Raj Patel and Zak Piper
Documentary | US | 2021 | 74 minutes | English, Tumbuka
#farmers #africa #ruralurbandivide #climatechange
Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate sceptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the US, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe we live on a different planet from everyone else. It will take all her skill and experience to persuade us that we're all in this together. This documentary, ten years in the making, weaves together the most urgent themes of our times: climate change, gender and racial inequality, the gaps between the rich and the poor, and the ideas that groups around the world have generated in order to save the planet.
WORKSHOP: Guild of Future Architects’ Futurist Writers Room
Facilitator: Robert Sinclair (writer, world-builder @ Sinclair Futures)
Advisors: Janani Balasubramanian (artist & researcher working at the intersections of contemporary art & science) and Paloma Lopez (co-founder & CEO, Future Fit Foods)
Scribe: Evan Walsh (Program Manager, Guild of Future Architects)
Imagine the past and remember the future. Co-creating speculative histories and futures is a powerful way to better understand our role in the present. In this vein, the Futurist Writers' Room invites you to imagine bold visions of the future of food systems. The Futurist Writers' Room will take attendees into possible futures through the power of collective imagination in order to co-create a new reality.
PANEL: The Future of Farming Is...?
Moderator: Audra Smith (Youth Council Member, FoodxFilm Festival 2021 & Co-Founder, Seed4Sower)
Panelists: Maximo Torero (Chief Economist, FAO), Mateusz Ciasnocha (Farmer & CEO, European Carbon Farmers), Kamal Bell (CEO, Sankofa Farms), A-Dae Romero Briones (Director of Programs - Native Food Systems and Agriculture, First Nations Development Institute)
Urban farming, carbon offset markets, regenerative agriculture… Understanding these buzzwords surrounding change can be confusing and difficult. Seize the opportunity to ask experts and growers to explain these terms to help you connect with their importance in the changing food world.
PANEL: Art + Food = Responsibility?
Moderator: Danielle Nierenberg (President, Food Tank)
Panelists: Nishtha Jain (Filmmaker, Writer, Survivor/Fighter, Wannabe Farmer), Nicholas Gill (Food Writer) Kafi Dixon (Founder, Common Good Cooperative), Sanjay Rawal (Director & Producer, GATHER & FOOD CHAINS)
Ideas around food, its history, and food systems have emerged as a focal point of powerful narratives, giving birth to films that resonate with many. As filmmakers bring these stories to light, are they accountable for the narratives their films reflect? Where does the creativity of the artist intersect with the obligation of responding to the discovered stories?
FILM: When Tomatoes Met Wagner
Director: Marianna Economou
Documentary | 2019 | Greece | 72 minutes | Greek, English, French with English, French and Portuguese subtitles
#farming #music #tomatoes #greece #independentfood
Do tomatoes taste better when they listen to the music of Richard Wagner? Elias, a small farming village in central Greece, is dying out. But two cousins team up with the village grannies to cultivate tomatoes. With a little help from Wagner’s music, the villagers export their little jars with organic tomato recipes across the world. The film follows the protagonists of this unlikely story, as they struggle to make their dream come true. Humorous and bittersweet, this surreal story speaks to us about the importance of reinventing oneself in times of crisis and the power of human relationships. A bittersweet story, two ingenious Greek cousins defy industrial farming by cultivating organic tomatoes sensitive to Wagner‘s music.
FILM: Shorts Program
Bisonhead
Director: Elizabeth Lo
Documentary | 2016 | 9 minutes | US | English
#buffalo #indigenous #shortdoc
A family of Ponderai Native Americans embark on a controversial journey through Yellowstone National Park to exercise their treaty hunting rights. Bisonhead glimpses into the continued marginalization of indigenous life in the American West, and challenges our expectations of what it means to assert a tribal heritage in the modern world.
The Elvermen
Director: Isla Badenoch
Documentary | 2021 | 14 minutes | UK | English
#eels #fishermen #britain #futurefood
Shot over a moonlit night, The Elvermen is an atmospheric film that reveals the last of a hidden community hunting an endangered fish. As the sun sets on the banks of the River Severn on the outskirts of an impoverished city in the UK, a group of men gather in a race to catch a vanishing creature; the elusive elver. After a day working in a print factory in Gloucester, Dave drives to the moonlit banks of the River Severn to hunt for an elusive fish, the rare elver (baby-eel), supposedly worth more than their weight in gold. Over the course of a night we experience the mysterious world of the Elvermen: the addictive gamble and stake-out amongst fathers, sons, brothers and friends. Phone calls of frustration and joy echo down a river lit by head torches. The Elvermen shows how a rite of passage has changed into a fight for values: of tradition, community, and a connection to nature in an environment of impending change.
Knife Skills
Director: Thomas Lennon
Documentary | 2017 | 40 minutes | US | English
#formerlyincarcerated #frenchcuisine #cleveland #restaurant
A film about reentry, second chances, and the healing power of food. What does it take to build a world-class French restaurant? What if the staff is almost entirely formerly incarcerated people? What if most have never cooked or served before, and have barely two months to learn their trade? Knife Skills follows the hectic launch of EDWINS restaurant in Cleveland. In this improbable setting, with its mouth-watering dishes and its arcane French vocabulary, we discover the challenges of the staff finding their way after their release. We come to know three trainees intimately, as well as the restaurant’s founder, who is himself haunted by his time in jail. They all have something to prove, and all struggle to forge new lives, an endeavor as pressured and perilous as their ambitious restaurant launch.
FILM: A Reckoning In Boston
Director: James Rutenbeck
Documentary | US | 2021 | 83 minutes | English
Kafi Dixon and Carl Chandler enrolled in a rigorous night course in the humanities at a community center in their Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. Kafi, 44, sharp, witty and restless, dropped out of school at 15. She had her first baby a year later and two more soon after. Carl, 65, who lives on a small pension and disability payment in one of Boston’s most dangerous neighborhoods, began the class with a keen interest in learning but with little faith in educational institutions. White suburban filmmaker James Rutenbeck came to Dorchester to document the students’ engagement with the Clemente Course in the Humanities. The Clemente Course is taught in thirty-four sites across the US—to those who have experienced homelessness, have transitioned out of incarceration, or have faced barriers to a college education. The Clemente mission is to foster critical thinking through deep engagement with history, literature, philosophy, and art history. Clemente students, its proponents assert, become fuller and freer citizens. But over the duration of making this film, James is forced to come to terms with a flawed film premise and his own complicity in racist structures. As he spends time with Carl and Kafi, he’s awakened to the violence, racism, and gentrification that threaten his collaborators’ very place in the city. Troubled by his failure to bring the film together, Rutenbeck spends more time listening than filming and enlists Kafi and Carl as collaborators/producers with a share in the film revenues. Five years on, despite many obstacles, Kafi and Carl arrive at surprising new places in their lives, and following their lead, James does too.
FILM: You Think the Earth is a Dead Thing
Director: Florence Lazar
Documentary | 2019 | France, Martinique | 70 minutes | Creole/French | English subtitles
#chlordecone #colonialism #bananas #martinique #artistfilm
Known in Creole as rimèd razie, or hedge remedies, the centuries-old traditions of using medicinal wild herbs and plants in Martinique persist until today. They represent one of several strategies that the island residents resort to in order to thwart the ravages from the widespread use of pesticides in the monoculture of banana plantations. The film visits local farmers on their small plots and in their gardens as they generously share wisdom and knowledge transmitted from their ancestors to safeguard biodiversity and indigenous seeds. Visually captivating, You Think the Earth Is a Dead Thing invites a vital meditation on decolonizing agricultural practices.
AUDIO THEATER + CONVERSATION: Soupy Salty Sonic
By Marina Zurkow & Anna Rose Hopkins
World Premiere: Audio Theatre + Conversation
A commission of the FoodxFilm Festival
Watch the archival recording now!
Zurkow and Hopkins premiere their immersive work as an audio immersion and panel event. Structured as a two-voiced guided meditation, this multi-sensory, experiential work offers the listener affection, sensuality, and affinity for the fluidity of the oceans—and their imperiled state. The work invites listeners to imaginatively morph, dis/orient and to literally envision becoming ocean; lose one’s human edges; and experience embodied benthic life as a variety of non-human creatures—from sea cucumber to whale to marine snow. Zurkow and Hopkins then segue into a participatory discussion exploring the tangled theme of oceanic foodways and ontologies, and features diverse voices from their community of activists, artists, scientists and scholars.
Moderators: Jennifer Jacquet (Associate Professor, Environmental Studies, NYU; Author, Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool), Una Chaudhuri (Professor, English/Drama/Environmental Studies, NYU), Katie Pearl (Director, Playwright, and Artist), Dylan Gauthier (Artist/Curator, Arts Project Space; Director, Elizabeth Foundation), Stacy Alaimo (Professor, English/Environmental Studies, University of Oregon), Carrie Roble (Vice President, River Project, Hudson River Park Trust), Kwonyin (Healing Artist & Educator), Dr. Elizabeth Bishop (Adjunct Assistant Professor, Youth Studies, CUNY; Author, Becoming Activist: Critical Literacy and Youth Organizing), Imani Black (Founder, Minorities In Aquaculture; Oyster Farmer)
EVENT: FOOD 2050: What do Visionaries picture for their future food systems?
Hosted by: Sara Farley (Managing Director, Food Initiative, The Rockefeller Foundation)
Featuring original mini documentaries filmed by Media RED: Sicangu Indian Reservation (7 Gen Food Systems), New York’s Hudson Valley (Stone Barns) and Beijing China (Mama’s Kitchen).
What does the year 2050 look like at the level of the soil, our diet, the way food is grown, transported, packaged, consumed? 1,300 communities around the world dared to put forward an answer through a first of its kind endeavor: the Food System Vision Prize. The Prize was conceived by The Rockefeller Foundation, in partnership with SecondMuse and OpenIDEO, as an invitation for communities, companies, universities and governments across the globe to be protagonists in their own food future. The Prize empowered participants globally to define a robust, interconnected picture of their 2050 food systems, detailing how culture, technology, policy, diets, and even economics would shift. Meet three of the audacious, inspired Vision prize winners and see their films in an engaging conversation with the filmmaker.
EVENT: Festival Launch
Hosted by Christopher Hibma (Festival Director) & Lauren Ruffin (Producing Director), 2021 FoodxFilm Festival
Join the Festival Launch for the inaugural 2021 FoodxFilm Festival! Experience resonant words from Dr. Agnes Kalibata (UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy to the 2021 Food Systems Summit), Máximo Torero (Chief Economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization), Sara Farley (Managing Director, Integrated Operations, Food Initiative, The Rockefeller Foundation) and other culture-makers—all who devote time to the current challenges of food around the world and the future of food. Don’t miss these inspiring messages to open the festival’s dynamic three days.
FILM: The Taste Of Desire
Director: Willemiek Kluijfhout
Documentary | Netherlands | 2021 | 87 minutes | English
#oysters #desire #global #fulfillment #burlesque #pearl
The oyster takes us on a poetic philosophical trip around the world, in which protagonists share their ambitions, desires and existential fears. A beautiful burlesque dancer in New York, struggling between motherhood and shining with her oyster act on stage, two Michelin chefs in France, who try to overcome the ego of the chef, a young woman in Sweden that made the radical decision to be an oyster diver, the pearl maker in Japan fighting the perfect image and a terminally ill English psychologist who hopes to finish his ultimate book about oysters. The oyster is a metaphor that connects them and symbolizes desire. Desires that both drive and feed life’s frustrations, infinite and unsatisfying. This documentary explores humanity’s relationship to nature – and the lengths we take to satisfy our own desires. For how do you deal with desires that are the main motive in our existence, but at the same time never (fully) fulfilled?
OPENING FILM: Gather
Director: Sanjay Rawal
Documentary | US | 2020 | 74 minutes | English | Subtitles available in Spanish and French
#indigenous #forage #farming #foodsovereignty
Gather is an intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political, and cultural identities through food sovereignty, while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide. Gather follows Nephi Craig, a chef from the White Mountain Apache Nation (Arizona), opening an indigenous café as a nutritional recovery clinic; Elsie Dubray, a young scientist from the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation (South Dakota), conducting landmark studies on bison; and the Ancestral Guard, a group of environmental activists from the Yurok Nation (Northern California) trying to save the Klamath river.