Final Project: Proposal, Project, Evaluation

Proposal:

What do you want to do?

Make an edited short film fleshing out ideas for a possible doc. on the causes and solutions for hunger in the world.

How long?

Not sure. Depends on what I decide to cover.

What are the issues?

How hunger is imaged... naked, starving emaciated brown and black children. As if white children don't suffer from it too.
The structural reasons underlying hunger: The Green Revolution and overall chemical use, genetically modified food, speculations by greedy banks leading to food price leaps, Biofuels etc. The entire concept of the free market is a problem because food is a commodity that is a privilege of affordability.
Colonization and globalization's part in the hunger crises. Land grabs by wealthy nations, leaving the poorer inhabitants screwed.
Overturn the prevailing paradigm that only whit Westerners are the experts when it comes to fixing global problems, often caused by the foreign policies of their governments. Overturn the idea that the people of the global South are disempowered victims who need to be helped. Overturn the idea that white Westerners are not victims of unequal food policy too. Hello 1/8 Americans in NY on food stamps!
How hunger can and has been solved, by a city of several million people. This is important because too often we think that alternative solutions can only be small-scale. There's a gap between theory and practice sometimes and its heartening to see that that gap can and has been closed.
The inadequacy of the World Food Programme

Details

Gathered lots of video on youtube. Have been reading articles about the issue for several years now, so continue with that.
Acquired a voice recorder.


Project:

How to Solve Hunger

How to Solve Hunger from level headed on Vimeo.

password: my docs (exactly like that)


Evaluation.

This is a very personal project for me. I was feeling rather overwhelmed with bad news from around the world a few days ago when someone linked articles on Yes Magazine The City That Ended Hunger. it was a concrete manifestation of the fact that all the food policy talks I'd watched and the books I'd read were not just theories, they were perfectly workable, and not just in small projects either. Belo Horizonte's is a significant city of several million people in Brazil. If it could work there, then there was hope for many other cities of comparable size, and definite hope for ways for even bigger cities to change.

Having had prior knowlege of the issue, I knew I wanted the badass Vandana Shiva to be a part of the film. She is an excellent speaker, environmental activist, physicist, philosopher, eco-feminist and all-around heroine of the revolution. I decided to try to make the film as comprehensive as I could. I needed to lay out the structural problems of the food system as it currently operates, to point out every systematic shortcoming, so that when I presented the radically different method Belo Horizonte chose to implement, viewers would understand why the success of their method of feeding people was so important. Bonus points came when I stumbled upon the World Food Programme adverts and became aware of that corn and soybean abomination, and then I found the PBS short doc on malnutrition and I knew it would make a GREAT contrast with the grain and fruit and veggies and meat, served in Belo Horizonte. Finding out through the Al Jazeera news cast that it was all as cheap as it was made me nearly dance in the editing lab, especially when I considered the potential that had for undercutting arguments about how expensive changing our ways was going to be. Overall, what I learned from this documentary is that solving the food crisis needs to start with changing our world view entirely. We need to see food as a right of all and not a commodity to make people rich. Start with that, and suddenly ways of fixing our problems open up.

Things I should have done better: I underestimated the time the vid would take to edit. And then at the last minute, an aesthetic addition ruined the carefully wrought arrangement of the thing, so that took up the time during which it should have been presented. In addition, I wanted to find a video pointing out the fact that food crises were one of the main issues behind the current Arab Spring, but I located that video after the whole thing had been Quicktime movied.

On the whole though, this was a pleasant experience and I do think that I would actually make this movie. In fact, I am currently looking at sources of funding and mentally putting together books and articles for research, as well as creating lists of possible interviewees. Thanks for assigning this, Prof!