Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Cinema Verde

I'm off to Gainesville, Florida tomorrow for Cinema Verde! They will show Mad City Chickens on Tuesday, along with other food films: Vegucated, Scientists Under Attack, a short from the Florida Organic Growers and Planeat & Fish Meat.

Trish Riley has done a great job over the past three years creating and building Cinema Verde. Lots of other great films are on the schedule: A Sea Change, Death of an American Town. Environmental films tend to be depressing -- I saw Gasland last night -- but several of these films put a more positive spin on their subjects.

For instance, Vegucated:
Vegucated is a feature-length documentary that follows three meat- and cheese-loving New Yorkers who agree to adopt a vegan diet for six weeks. There’s Brian, the bacon-loving bachelor who eats out all the time, Ellen, the single mom who prefers comedy to cooking, and Tesla, the college student who avoids vegetables and bans beans. They have no idea that so much more than steak is at stake and that the fate of the world may fall on their plates. Lured with true tales of weight lost and health regained, they begin to uncover hidden sides of animal agriculture and soon start to wonder whether solutions offered in films like Food, Inc. go far enough. Before long, they find themselves risking everything to expose an industry they supported just weeks before.

Scientists Under Attack presents the story of Monsanto's GMO crop plants and the company's resistance to finding answers to questions raised by this new technology. BR Online says: “Amazing how this movie brings facts to light that reveal the fine line between agrogenetic engineers and sellers of poison and proves how critics are ostracised by unfair means. Verhaag does not try to do justice to every party, and instead takes a harsh stance. He is consciously subjective when he reveals how Monsanto and the other large businesses finance science and determine what is investigated and how in accordance with the principle of 'He who pays the piper calls the tune.' Belief in noble and incorrupt research and science is reduced to absurdity."

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