Closed Captioned
Grades 9-12, College, Adults
Directed by Curt Ellis
Produced by Curt Ellis and Aaron Woolf
DVD Purchase $251, Rent $95
US Release Date: 2010
Copyright Date: 2009
DVD ISBN: 1-59458-930-5
Subjects
Agriculture
Anthropology
Biology
Chemistry
Ecology
Environment
Geography
Health
Marine Biology
Pollution
Rivers
Toxic Chemicals
Water
Awards and Festivals
Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival
Bend Film Festival
American Conservation Film Festival
Flagstaff Food Film Festival
Princeton Environmental Film Festival
Frozen River Film Festival
(with King Corn classroom version)
Companion film to KING CORN about the ecological consequences of industrial agriculture. DVD contains new classroom version of KING CORN.
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"A sharp and clever reminder that nothing ever really goes away." Bill McKibben, Author, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet |
Note This DVD also includes the new closed captioned, classroom version of KING CORN (50 mins).
Following up on their Peabody Award-winning documentary KING CORN, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis have returned to Iowa with a new mission: to investigate the environmental impact their acre of corn has had on the people and places downstream.
In a journey that spans from the heartland to the Gulf of Mexico, Ian and Curt trade their combine for a canoe, and set out to see the big world their little acre of corn has touched. On their trip, flashbacks to the pesticides they sprayed, the fertilizers they injected, and the soil they plowed now lead to new questions, explored by new experts in new places. Half of Iowa's topsoil, they learn, has been washed out to sea. Fertilizer runoff has spawned a hypoxic 'dead zone' in the Gulf. And back at their acre, the herbicides they used are blamed for a cancer cluster that reaches all too close to home.
A lively investigation and a worthy follow-up, BIG RIVER grows to ask is industrial agriculture worth its hidden costs?
Note about the short version of KING CORN by co-creator, Curt Ellis: "In creating a classroom-length version of KING CORN, our goal was to keep the content and spirit of the original film intact, while trimming out any details that weren't essential to the film's main points.
The similarities. Both the full-length version and the classroom version structure their stories around my best friend Ian and me moving to Iowa, growing an acre of corn, and setting out to see where our harvest will go when it leaves the farm. Both versions follow corn into corn-fed meat and corn-sweetened soda, and both uncover corn's role as an enabler of fast food, obesity, and diabetes. Both versions deal closely with farm subsidies, using archival footage and a visit to the elderly Earl Butz, father of modern American farm policy. And both films strive to deal fairly and compassionately with the farmers, experts, policymakers and professionals who appear on screen.
The differences. In the full-lengh version, we explore the fact that Ian and I had family roots in rural Iowa; in the classroom version we don't mention it. In the full-length version, we show us injecting fertilizer and applying herbicide; in the classroom version we just include the fertilizer scene. (That alone still gets the point across that farming has largely become a chemical profession, and still conveys the theme that the overriding goal of modern agriculture is to grow as much corn as possible. The chemical aspects of our farm are explored most thoroughly in the accompanying BIG RIVER.) In the full-length film, we include a few scenes that deal with corn as Americana; in the classroom version we remove those moments.
If you're able to, we hope you'll put both copies in your library. The full-length version has the pacing and nuance that made KING CORN really sing when it showed it theaters; the short version hits the highlights and ships with a copy of our follow-up film BIG RIVER, which we think takes the KING CORN conversation to the next place it needs to go.
We're grateful for your support, and for showing KING CORN in the classroom."
Reviews
"A sharp and clever reminder that nothing ever really goes away, certainly not the soup of chemicals we're pouring on our fields."
"In Walden, Henry David Thoreau defines the `true cost of a thing' as `the amount of life exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.' With characteristically understated eloquence, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis illuminate the devastating downstream consequences of growing corn, the central commodity of the American food system. After witnessing these health and environmental effects, viewers may well conclude that the `true costs' are too much for us or our children to bear."
"Big River tells 'the rest of the story.' King Corn helped us to understand how growing corn in Iowa is not particularly profitable for farmers. Big River takes us down stream from the farm to better understand additional unintended consequences--of growing as much corn as possible as--especially to the quality of our water. I appreciated the fact that Big River does not blame the farmer for this ecological disaster. As Paul Thompson has indicated, farmers are now forced into a system which requires them to 'produce as much as possible, regardless of the cost' and Big River points out some of the costs to the farmer, to the environment, and to our communities...We have all been living as if nature's sinks were limitless and they are now full, so we have to redesign our human economies, including agriculture, to function within the limits of nature's resources and nature's absorption capacity. Anything short of that will only degrade our big rivers even more--to the detrimentof the health of all living species--including our own. Big River begins to help us understand that."
"[Big River] raises profound questions about the current petroleum-based agriculture on which Americans rely for most of their food. With rising petroleum prices, widespread environmental problems, and climate change we will need to rethink the very foundations of modern agriculture. It is simply too important to be left to the experts. This film provides a good starting point for public engagement."
"King Corn uses an acre of corn in Iowa to explain how our quest for cheap calories diminishes the quality of our food. Big River uses a canoe trip down the Mississippi to explain how millions of acres of Iowa corn diminish the quality of life of those who live downwind and downstream. Together they make a compelling case for radical changes in what we eat and the ways we produce food."