[hupso title=”EXCLUSIVE new clip of @FoodChainsFilm, oscar buzz, & more ahead of #Thanksgiving release! ” url=”https://ciw-online.org/blog/2014/10/oscar-buzz/”]
Film industry starting to take notice as Indiewire, Awards Circuit run stories on “Food Chains” ahead of its Thanksgiving release!
The theatrical release of a feature film on the Campaign for Fair Food has always seemed, quite honestly, a little surreal, but as we reach the one month mark in the countdown to its November 21st release, it’s becoming more real by the day.
Above is an exclusive clip shared with the online industry blog Indiewire for a quick story on the film, presented with this introduction:
With all things “organic,” “artisanal,” and “locally sourced” being among the food trends of the past several years, it can be very easy to forget about the human cost of the “farm-to-table” approach. For all the advances made as such, the food industry is still far behind the times when it comes to the conditions of farm workers, and the upcoming documentary “Food Chains” aims to shine a light on those concerns.
Directed by Sanjay Rawal, the film chronicles the modern day farm workers rights movement, taking us into the lives of the people who pick our food and get it on a truck long before it arrives on shelves or is ready to be ordered in restaurants. In this exclusive clip, we see quite clearly the conditions many farmworkers live in, the long hours they work to support their families, and the sacrifices endured to make ends meet. read more
The clip is an excellent vignette of farmworker life, the life that is changing today in Immokalee thanks to the Fair Food Program. Definitely take a couple of minutes to check it out, then make sure to see the film in its entirety next month.
But you’re going to have to line up early to get tickets when you do, if the early Oscar buzz is any indication! Awards Circuit magazine — motto: “Where Oscar Week Never Ends” — has put “Food Chains” in the conversation for the 2015 Oscar for Best Documentary. In a story entitled, “2015 Predictions – Best Documentary Feature,” the farmworker documentary came in at #18 on the list — not top five, true, but nothing to sneeze at either, considering the hundreds and hundreds of documentaries produced each year and the intense competition out there.
In fact, the listing is a huge surprise, given that the film hasn’t even been released yet. Screenings in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have all helped raise the film’s profile and generated great word-of-mouth buzz. The next screening is tonight, in fact, in Los Angeles at the International Documentary Association’s screening series, to be followed by a Q&A session with “Food Chains” Executive Producer Eva Longoria. That will be followed by mid-November gala premieres in LA and New York, which should also help fuel awareness of the film ahead of the first round of Oscar voting in late November.
But the Oscar documentary short list is apparently not released until mid-December, and if “Food Chains” is to have any chance of being on that list — and if the Campaign for Fair Food is to have any chance of receiving the national visibility that such a distinction would bring — the Fair Food Nation is going to have to do its part!
It’s time to start spreading the word about the “Food Chains” theatrical release on Facebook and Twitter and to join social media events around the film like this week’s Food Day twitter campaign (more details coming soon on the Food Day event, so stay tuned!). More and more TUGG screenings — check out this link if you don’t know what a TUGG screening is yet — would help spread the word, too, as well as social media promotion around those screenings in towns and cities across the Fair Food Nation. If you’d like to learn more about how to get a TUGG screening in your community or how to help get the word out about “Food Chains”, you can email the film crew at Rebecca [at[ Picturemotion [dot] com.