They'll enjoy a cob or two, but Cheney and Ellis see corn as a staple in dysfunctional agripolicy.
Byproducts of corn: obesity, mash-ups
In an upcoming Independent Lens doc, two friends use an acre of Iowa farmland to grow 10,000 pounds of cattle-feed corn and dozens of short user-generated videos.
King Corn, slated to debut on public TV April 15, follows America’s preeminent cash crop from the field to the dinner plate — or, more often, to the fast-food bag. In following two young Yale grads, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, as Iowa corn farmers, the film outlines how corn earns heavy federal subsidies for the farmer while contributing to America’s obesity problem and other ills. (They mostly leave ethanol issues for someone else’s film.)
Off-air, King Corn also serves as a basis of an experimental public TV exercise in content sharing. Through a partnership with AFI’s Digital Content Lab, ITVS launched Filmocracy, a video mash-up contest that urges participants to “make a statement about the politics of food in America” by remixing clips from the film, available online, plus cleared footage from Getty Images and their own creativity. The contest is at www.pbs.org/filmocracy.
The Inside Indies section of the Independent Lens site includes instructional videos and articles from filmmakers to help amateurs refine their creative mojo.
The goal, as with so many pubcaster projects these days, is to snag new users and “stay relevant” by embracing new media platforms and their participatory, media-sharing zeitgeist, says Cathy Fischer, senior producer for ITVS Interactive. ITVS is trying viral, social media marketing by creating King Corn pages on MySpace, Facebook and Flickr, and offers editing tools and resulting mash-ups on Eyespot.com, where users can make and share videos, including mini-videos for mobile devices (http://eyespot.com/promotion/filmocracy).
“King Corn was the perfect vehicle for this,” Fischer says. “The protagonists are young, they take an unconventional approach to the subject, and they’re open to letting people use content to make something new.”
The idea behind the doc started with a road trip and a couple locks of hair. Not long after a typical, junk food-fueled drive across the country, best buddies Cheney and Ellis offered up hair samples for analysis and discovered that most of the carbon in their bodies came from corn.
That was the kernel of their awakening, which grew as they inspected labels on supermarket shelves that revealed the extent to which corn-based products, such as the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup, pervade the American diet.
To learn how corn gets from “a field in Iowa to our hair,” the pair — along with their director and producer, public TV doc vet Aaron Woolf — went to Greene, Iowa, in early 2004.
They sowed genetically engineered kernels, plied their plot with powerful fertilizers and herbicides and followed their harvest through the marketplace. Along the way they learned about diabetes and corn syrup-sweetened soft drinks and about how corn-fed livestock make for less healthy, but cheaper, steaks and chops.
They also discovered that all this unhealthy business likely wouldn’t be profitable without government subsidies.
Cheney and Ellis received a grand total of $28 from the feds for their acre of corn. But, as Cheney narrates, “the more corn you grow, the more money you get.” In 2005, for example, the U.S. government paid corn farmers $9.4 billion in subsidies, according to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (cited on the film’s website, www.kingcorn.net).
Stop-motion animation using corn kernels and Fisher-Price toys cleverly traces the evolution of U.S. farm policy. Cheney and Ellis also give time to the architect of the modern subsidy program, Earl Butz, who argues, not unreasonably, that plentiful, inexpensive food is not necessarily a bad thing. (Butz, secretary of agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford, died last month.)
But when the market for fast and cheap food is dominated by food packed with corn calories, what is the cost to America’s waistline and the health of its youth? The filmmakers have traveled with the film, which debuted theatrically last year, to various film festivals and special screenings to talk about farm policy and its byproducts. The film’s website notes that in 2005, the same year the U.S. government paid $9.4 billion to corn farmers, it spent less than $1 million to promote farmers’ markets, with their fresh, locally grown produce. Cheney is currently a food and society fellow with the Thomas Jefferson Agricultural Institute living in Portland, Ore.; Woolf, the director, operates Urban Rustic, a Brooklyn grocery store and cafe specializing in locally and sustainably produced food.
ITVS will accept users’ short takes on the yellow menace and food policy in general through May 30. Filmocracy contest winners will be announced June 23 — the grand prize winner will get $1,000, a chance to be screened at one of ITVS’s Community Cinema events and other prizes.
ITVS hopes to give at least one film each season the Filmocracy treatment; it’s still considering which of next season’s offerings might be the best fit, Fischer says.
Web page posted March 31, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
