Film Finders: Exploring Special Topics

A documentary chronicling the current state of the U.S. meat industry. First explaining how America arrived at our current industrial system, the story shifts to the present day, showing the feedlots and confinement houses, not through hidden cameras but through the eyes of the farmers who live and work there.

What's in our food and how is it grown? Deconstructing Supper is a journey into the revolution in modern food production, and its effects on our lives.

Join Ellen Frankenstein on a search for a sustainable, healthy and ethical meal. Eating Alaska shows natives and non-natives trying to balance buying industrial processed foods with growing their own and living off the land in the 21st century.

Explores the U.S. commercial food industry, examining corporate control of supply and market. The film seeks to demonstrate how the incentive for corporate profit can overwhelm consumer health needs, as well as the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and the environment.

FOOD DESIGN takes a look at a major food manufacturer to show how form, color, smell, consistency, the sounds made during eating, manufacturing technique, history and stories are all aspects of food and eating that both influence food design, and are created by it.

This film examines the claim that most if not all degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by adopting a whole food, plant-based diet.

Fresh celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet.

Future Food is a documentary series that asks how we are going to feed ourselves in the 21st century, and looks for answers in Peru, Kenya, USA, India, Nigeria and China.

Documents the trend of unlabeled genetically-modified foods which have become increasingly prevalent in grocery stores. Explores organic and sustainable agriculture as alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture.

Evidence points to genetically engineered foods as a major contributor to rising disease rates in the U.S. population, especially among children ... Monsanto's strong arm tactics, the FDA's fraudulent policies, and how the USDA ignores a growing health emergency are also laid bare.

Examines the struggle between multinational corporations, governments and consumers on the issue of genetically modified foods.

Obesity and diabetes are on the rise, food costs are skyrocketing, family farms are in decline, and our agricultural environment is in jeopardy. Explore a thriving local food movement as our world becomes a more flavorless, disconnected, and dangerous place to eat.

After catching a glimpse of the billions of dollars of good food that is tossed each year in North America, Jen and Grant pledge to quit grocery shopping cold turkey and survive only on foods that would otherwise be thrown away.

The proponents of globalization suggest we buy our food from the cheapest sources, no matter where in the world that might be. Now that food prices are rising again, countries rich and poor have begun to reconsider the price of imported food and many governments are setting quotas in support of local food production.

Within the last half century, new technologies and scientific ingenuity have given rise to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and other man-made foods. People have begun to raise concerns about the safety of GMOs in our food supply. This Of the Land film looks at our current food supply system as well as a variety of smaller, organic options available to consumers.

The story of the search for a diet which is good for our health, good for the environment and good for the future of the planet.

Examines issues involved in creating an impending global food crisis, including the politics of food security and scarcity, declining food production, and the need for increased production to meet population growth, the impact of genetically modified foods, water shortages, famine, food aid programs, the loss of crop land, and national food production, distribution and export policies.

Looks at the past and future of soul food, and the role it plays in the health crisis in the African American community. Examines the socioeconomics of the modern American diet, and how the food industry profits from producing cheap calories while healthy options remain expensive and hard to find.

A feature documentary that examines the various tactics that has many health experts calling sugar the new tobacco.

Voices of Transition presents solutions to the food security challenges humans increasingly face.

"Wasted!" aims to change the way people buy, cook, recycle, and eat food. It exposes the criminality of food waste and how it's directly contributing to climate change and shows how each of us can make small changes to solve it.

Reveals the dysfunctionality of the industrialized world food system and shows what world hunger has to do with us.

“What’s On Your Plate” is about kids and food politics; what kids eat, where it comes from, and why it makes people so sick. Sadie and Safiyah, two eleven-year-old biracial city kids, explore their place in the food chain by taking a close look at food systems in New York City and its surrounding areas meeting with food activists, farmers, storekeepers, and their families in their quest to understand what’s on all of our plates.

In California, the agriculture is suffering from a lack of water, and farms are being abandoned at an alarming rate. But here, and in many other dry regions around the world, land restoration is helping water infiltrate into the soil to help increase crop yields.

Following up on their documentary “King Corn”, the filmakers have returned to investigate the environmental impact their acre of corn has had on the people and places downstream.

In this documentary, we follow environmental activist and nuclear physicist Vandana Shiva as she does battle with the proponents of globalization, multi-national corporations like Monsanto, and Coca-Cola. Bullshit elucidates some of the most pressing social and technological questions of the 21st century.

Pro-business loopholes allow the American chemical industry to export pesticides to other countries even after they had been federally banned for their harmful effects. Produce treated with these chemicals often returns to the US unchecked, threatening American lives. Grassroots activists all over the world are fighting back.

This film chronicles the struggles of Kentucky's farm community to move away from dependency on the global tobacco and petroleum economies to a more sustainable and sane agricultural economy.

Examines the contributions of cattle and the cattle industry to global warming, resource consumption and environmental degradation and investigates why the world's leading environmental organizations are too afraid to talk about it.

Featuring live action and animation, this movie examines the history and current state of the living organic matter that we come from and will later return to.

Documentary on the controversy surrounding GMO food production.

With the average age of farmers in the U.S. currently at 57, it's critical to encourage more young people to take up the plow. GROW! profiles a new crop of idealistic young farmers who have turned to the fields for a more fulfilling life, driven also by a strong desire to change how our food is grown.

The documentary begins with an investigation of the 2008 global food crisis, looking at the long-term underlying causes. After hearing about efforts in Venezuela to develop a more equitable and sustainable food and agriculture system, the filmmaker heads there to see if it's working and find out what we might be able to learn from this giant experiment.

Giant agribusiness and internet companies are investing millions in trying to invent remedies for hunger using new technological forms of nutrition. This film investigates these new methods, efficient for fighting malnutrition, and how they may contribute to increasing the dependence of poor countries on industrialized agriculture.

Presents three ecologically responsible farms in the USA and Canada. Their unique business plans eliminate the middle man, use sustainable methods and few fossil fuels and show that a decent living can be made!

This documentary explores some little-known aspects of global trade agreements. Patents and other intellectual property rights are expanding what corporations can own and control -- from machines to knowledge and even living creatures.

Documentary on the international urban agricultural movement, both in the U.S. and cities around the world. Focuses on a urban farming as a means by which healthy, locally-grown food may become more widely available to people across the nation and around the world.

A documentary about how mass deaths of bees have recently swept all over the world. If the dramatic decline in worldwide bee populations continues, essential food crops could disappear, along with entire ecosystems.

A documentary film that explores the complexity and mystery of soil. The film portrays soil as a protagonist of our planetary story, showing that soil is a complex living organism, the foundation of life on earth.

This documentary takes an investigative look at the economic, political and ecological implications of the worldwide disappearance of the honeybee.

Against the Grain slashes through biotechnology's propaganda, revealing the science and politics behind "transgenic" foods to show how biotech companies increasingly engineer what you eat to be compatible with their chemicals-but not necessarily good for human health.

This film investigates such issues as genetic engineering, terminator seeds, and the pitfalls of industrial agriculture in North America. The film offers several easy solutions for citizens and governments in the United States and Canada, including supporting organic growers and starting your own organic garden.

Explores the loss of genetic diversity in food crops, as farmers around the world grow hybrids instead of local varieties. Looks at efforts to collect, save, grow, and distribute rare and threatened seeds.

How do GMOs affect our children, the health of our planet, and our freedom of choice? Is it even possible to reject the food system currently in place, or have we lost something we can't gain back?

Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis return to their home of Greene, Iowa, to find out how the modest corn kernel conquered America. With the help of real farmers, powerful fertilizer, government aid, and genetically modified seeds, the friends manage to grow one acre of corn and unlock the hidden truths about America's modern food system.

A documentary that questions why genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are not labeled on food products in the United States and Canada, despite being labeled in 64 countries around the world.

Documentary discusses plant seeds and how large agriculture companies are creating genetically modified seeds and what effect that may have on the genetic pool of seeds.

Deep inside a snow-covered mountain is the Global Seed Vault, an attempt to collect and preserve seeds of all food crops in the world. But who actually owns the seeds?

Follows Cary Fowler as he attempts to re-invent a global food system in order to make it sustainable by safeguarding the world's vulnerable gene banks.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a collection of the seeds of thousands of different plant species, held in frozen reserve against the eventuality of ecological disaster or other means of crop extinction. This program spotlights scientists who are working with the Svalbard team to preserve Earth's biodiversity.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MONSANTO pieces together the story of the industrial giant that has become one of the world's leading seed manufacturers, spreading genetically modified crops world-wide with no real monitoring of their effects on nature or human health.