COOKED

Images

Mass burial in "potters field" of unclaimed heat wave victims. Chicago Tribune, August 1995.

Still from COOKED: kids cooling off in hydrant on Chicago's South Side, July 2008.

Still from COOKED.

Clip from archival news footage of a heat victim being removed from home in July 1995.

Topics

Economy: Business, Consumption, Credit and Investment
Environment: Atmosphere, Climate Change, Conservation, Environmental Activism, Pollution, Soils
Health: Disease/treatment, Nutrition/Malnutrition
Human Development: Agriculture, Capacity Building, Children, Education, Emergency Relief, Energy, Food, Land, MDGs, Poverty, Shelter & Housing, Social Exclusion, Urban, Youth
Human Rights: Civil Rights, Race Politics, Social Exclusion
Information & Media: Communication, Media
Peace and Conflict: Security
Politics: Activism, Civil Society, Codes of Conduct, Corruption & Transparency, Ethics & Value Systems, Globalization, Governance, Justice and Crime

Project Geography

US: National, Illinois, Kentucky, New York
International: North America

Identity Niches

African American, Caucasian, Children, Religious, Senior/Aging, Student, Women, Youth/Teen

Budget

Raised to date: $296,500.00
Estimate to complete: $490,410.00
Total Estimated Budget: $786,910.00
The budget numbers above are accurate as of 04/19/2009

Status

Production

Media Type

Video

Project End Use

Other: Theaterical and TV and Educational

Key Personnel

Judith Helfand
Director/Producer

Filmmaker, activist and educator, Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark, cynical worlds of chemical exposure, heedless corporate behavior, and environmental injustice and make them personal, resonant, highly charged and entertaining. Her films, THE UPRISING OF ‘34 (Co-directed with George Stoney), the Sundance-award-winning, twice Emmy nominated Blue Vinyl (co-directed with Daniel B. Gold), and its Peabody-award-winning prequel A HEALTHY BABY GIRL (a five-year video-diary about her experience with DES related cancer) and more recently EVERYTHING’S COOL (co-directed with Daniel Gold), explore home, class, corporate accountability, intergenerational relationships and the ever shrinking border between what is personal and what is a critical part of the public record.

She’s Co-Founder/Development Strategist/Field Explorer for Working Films www.workingfilms.org , a national organization that is a dynamic bridge between high-profile non-fiction filmmaking and cutting edge social change organizing and Co-founder/Director of Strategic & Creative Development for Chicken & Egg Pictures www.chickeneggpics.org a hybrid foundation/non-profit dedicated to strategically supporting emergent and veteran women filmmakers with money and mentorship. Helfand was a recipient of a 2007 United States Artist Fellowship grant one of fifty awarded to "America's finest living artists" to nurture, support, and strengthen their work and a 2008 Rockefeller/Tribeca Media Arts Fellow for COOKED.

She has worked as a full-time documentary instructor at NYU’s Undergraduate School for Film & Television, taught Doc Boot Camp for three years at New School University and is Filmmaker in Residence at the Nelson Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches environmental documentary making and “Community Engagement though Film” to non-filmmaking students from -- environmental science and conservation to religion and the history of medicine. To view the trailers that my students produced in 2007 for the first Tales From Planet Earth Environmental Film Festival go to: http://envhist.wisc.edu/trailers/

Fenell Doremus
Co-Producer
Fenell Doremus is a Chicago-based producer who as worked in documentary film since graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in Sociology. She began her career as an Assistant Editor on the now classic, award-winning HOOP DREAMS and went on to serve as Staff Producer at Kartemquin Films for eight years. Doremus was Segment Co-Producer and Editor of The New Americans, broadcast on PBS in 2004 and winner of multiple awards at festivals worldwide. Doremus’ other documentary work includes producing and editing segments for the Emmy Award winning regional PBS series, ArtBeat. Her latest piece for the series was a special half-hour show devoted entirely to A YEAR ON TEEN STREET following a teen theater group for one year. She has worked as Field Producer and Coordinating Producer for Hedrick Smith Productions (PBS series SEEKING SOLUTIONS), Daniel Alpert (THE CALLING, scheduled for broadcast in 2009) and Maria Finitzo (5 GIRLS). 

Lewis Erskine
Senior Consulting Editor

Lewis Erskine's films include JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLE'S TEMPLE (which received the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and the Peabody Award Winning film THE MURDER OF EMMETT TILL, both directed by Stanley Nelson for the American Experience, two episodes of Ken Burns' JAZZ series, NOW WITH BILL MOYERS and BILL MOYERS ON FAITH AND REASON and WAGING A LIVING (POV). He was a consulting editor on Byron Hurt's HIP-HOP: BEYOND BEATS AND RHYMES and has worked as an Editing Mentor for the Sundance Documentary Lab.

Outreach/Engagement Plan(s)

Linking the distribution of COOKED to a redefinition ofdisaster and economic revitalization -- one city, one blue-print fortransformation and one green job at a time.

My intention with COOKED is to inspire and emboldenindividuals, communities, and policy makers alike to actively participate inredefining “disaster.”  Five years from the film’s release, I hope “disasterpreparedness” and “adaptation to global warming” will become synonymous withcreating healthy, equitable, livable communities, complete with stores, “greenjobs,” and access to locally grown affordable food.

To do this we are developing and producing an interactive,community-driven assets mapping project -- “Blueprint for Transformation".This mapping project will serve COOKED and the long-term engagement effortin two different ways: it will be woven into the very narrative of the film andit will serve as a standalone project, which will live on the web as anever-evolving map and “tool kit” for other socially/economically isolatedneighborhoods who are striving to redefine “disaster preparedness” to mean resilience– and who are activelyworking towards turning “blight” into local “green” economic opportunity.

Over the next year we'll collaborate with and follow SouthSide residents and activists as they map their neighborhood's assets and infrastructure,develop on-the-ground strategies, envision a local economy built around urbanorganic agriculture and “green job” opportunity/demand with the goal of takingthat map to the disaster masters and emergency managers at city hall.

The team of South Side community activists and residentswill range in age from thirteen to eighty. They will be trained on mapping andgathering asset data that is both visual and narrative in nature.  The platform that we will use will bedeveloped at the BAVAC Producer’s Institute in New York City January 7-14,2011. We are thrilled to be included in this very intensive, competitive,hands-on workshop where we will be matched with technology experts [ie googlemap-type-folks] and programmers at the top of their field.

Over the next year we will be there on the ground inChicago to record this community-driven vision of resilience, with the hopethat it will challenge decision makers to stop waiting for extreme weather toreveal extreme poverty – to redefine “disaster preparedness” as preparedto thrive, everyday.

BACKGROUND:

Building on a decade of developing innovative communityengagement strategies around The Uprising of 34 (1995) and A Healthy Baby Girl(1997), I co-founded Working Films with Robert West in 1999. Our coremethodology when we founded the organization in 2000 has remained the same: whatwe like to refer to as a “social change calculus”: CONTENT + INTENT =CHANGE.  Compelling non-fictionnarratives coupled with innovative and strategic organizing and activism resultsin community and audience engagement that leads to authentic transformation –the kind you can measure.  Our goalis steadfast: leverage the power of non-fiction storytelling to advancestruggles for economic and environmental justice and human and civil rights. Now in our tenth year, Working Films remains committed to longterm, concrete, and systemic change for a less cynical, less toxic, morehealthy, sustainable and equitable world. I have no doubt that my professionalcontributions to WORKING FILMS as Co-founder, Strategist and “Field Explorer”are exponentially strengthened by my work as a WORKING FILMMAKER.

I strive to use my own films as a laboratory forexperimenting with all of the ideas, concerns, concepts and narratives ofon-the-ground organizers and the movements who need your film most. How tobalance those needs with the needs of a film’s narrative and the ever evolvingopportunities that come with multi-tiered distribution (film festivals,broadcast, online, website, streaming etc.)

Blue Vinyl’s www.myhouseisyourhouse.org(tchotchkie-driven) campaign was designed with the nation’s leadingenvironmental justice, healthcare and green building organizations (HealthyBuilding Network, Healthcare Without Harm, Green Peace, COEJL and more recentlyGreen Faith and the Center for Environmental Health and Justice) and helpedinspire: Kaiser Permanente Hospital Corp to insist its manufacturers createpvc-free floor tile for its mega network of hospitals, a prototype pvc-freeHabitat for Humanity house; some very big box Stores to eliminate pvcpackaging; and the recent launch of www.buildingingoodfaith.org.Everything’s Cool (2007) www.everythingscool.orgbuilt on these relationships and model, as will COOKED. 


Funders

Location