“Payback,” a new film by the award-winning Canadian documentary director Jennifer Baichwal, featuring an extensive segment on farm labor exploitation and the Campaign for Fair Food!
Adapting the 2008 best-seller “Payback” by author Margaret Atwood to film, Canadian documentary director Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Nick de Pencier are premiering their new film, by the same name, at the Sundance Festival this weekend. The Sundance program describes “Payback”:
| “Jennifer Baichwal’s brilliant documentaries exemplify the alignment of form with content as she imaginatively transposes other artists’ work into the film medium to explore and expand their narratives. In her latest such project, Baichwal undertakes the ambitious task of cinematizing PAYBACK, Margaret Atwood’s visionary book of essays about systems of wealth, justice, and reparation.
Seemingly disparate forays into the worlds of migrant tomato pickers in Florida, feuding clans in Albania, victims of BP’s oil spill, and a repentant inmate all mix with insights from thinkers like theologian Karen Armstrong, ecologist William Rees, public critic Raj Patel, and Atwood herself. Integrating Atwood’s words with their outlooks, Baichwal’s luxurious pacing, arresting imagery, and astonishing juxtapositions stimulate provocative associations among ideas and realities. Both visceral and revelatory, PAYBACK plunges us deeply into reconsidering the roots of social inequity, what we value, and debt’s profound role as an organizing principle in our lives—one that shapes relationships, society, and the fate of the planet.” read more |
The film includes an extensive segment on the plight of tomato pickers in Florida and on the Campaign for Fair Food as a means to address the societal debt owed to generations of farmworkers whose undervalued and exploited labor has fueled the wealth of the larger food industry for decades.
Many of us here at the CIW had the pleasure of working with Jennifer and Nick during their time filming in Florida. If there were ever two filmmakers who more richly deserve every success in their work than these two, we have yet to meet them. They are great artists, but, more than that, they are even better people. We wish them and the film the best of luck at Sundance, and look forward to seeing the film when it hits theaters this April 25th.