{"id":19745,"date":"2020-02-03T12:50:06","date_gmt":"2020-02-03T20:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=blog&p=19745"},"modified":"2023-08-29T16:22:55","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T23:22:55","slug":"how-cooked-evolved-into-an-investigation-of-the-disaster-underlying-a-disaster","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/blog\/how-cooked-evolved-into-an-investigation-of-the-disaster-underlying-a-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"How “Cooked” Evolved into an Investigation of the Disaster Underlying a Disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Documentary filmmaker Judith Helfand<\/strong> is best known for her ability to take the dark worlds of chemical exposure, heedless corporate behavior and environmental injustice and make them personal, highly-charged and entertaining. Her films include\u00a0The Uprising of \u201834<\/i>, the Sundance award-winning and 2x Emmy-nominated\u00a0Blue Vinyl <\/i><\/strong>(about the health hazards of vinyl), its Peabody Award-winning prequel\u00a0A Healthy Baby Girl<\/i>, and\u00a0Everything\u2019s Cool<\/i>. Many of these films have environmental themes, yet bring subjects that can often feel overwhelming down to a very personal live as a way “in” to these important stories, with her\u00a0quirky sense of humor and irony, personal storytelling chops and emphasis on the power of transparency to get to the truth. All of that is never clearer than it is in her film Cooked: Survival by Zip Code<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Of the film, Ray Pride wrote in the Chicago Reader<\/em><\/a>, “Helfand\u2019s nonfiction adaption of Eric Klinenberg\u2019s Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago<\/em> is descriptive, but prescriptive, too. Helfand describes how perspective has shifted in the twenty-four years since [the heatwave] and the years the documentary has been in production. It\u2019s not just climate change and patterns of vast weather distortion, it\u2019s our perception of system failures that only begin at structural racism. As Helfand asks, ‘What if with a slight torque of the system and a reframe of the terms \u2018disaster,’ ‘preparedness’ and ‘resilience,’ we could invest in the most vulnerable communities now\u2014instead of waiting for the next \u2018natural disaster\u2019?’ Urgent questions, asked crisply and well.”<\/p>\n

Helfand, who lives in New York with her five-year-old daughter Theodora, took time out to talk to us about what led her to make Cooked: Survival by Zip Code<\/em>, and her unique approach in telling it.<\/p>\n

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For many Americans (like me) who were around then, even if aware of the Chicago heatwave of ‘<\/strong>95, we didn’t understand the full scope of the tragedy at the time. What was your first memory of learning about the tragedy?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I first learned about the heatwave when I read Eric Klinenberg\u2019s book. I was amazed by his concept of a social autopsy, by the fact that an extreme weather event could reveal so much about our everyday life and the disaster underlying the disaster. By the refrigerated trucks that had to be used to store the overflow of bodies at the morgue. This heatwave and the 700 plus deaths revealed the health disparity, wealth gap, blight, lack of infrastructure and social isolation that comes with the long-term impact of segregation and our inability and unwillingness to face it. <\/span><\/p>\n

But it took a \u201cnatural disaster\u201d to force us to see the underlying man-made one. But as I say in the film, I don\u2019t know what shocked me more, the specter of this story or the fact that I had no memory of it. Where was I? I was in an air-conditioned edit room on the Upper West Side, working on a film exploring my own personal disaster with DES-related cancer and I didn\u2019t look up. (I was working on A Healthy Baby Girl<\/em>). Oddly enough, there is a tumor registry for DES-related cancer in Hyde Park at the University of Chicago and my very cancerous life-threatening tumor is there in a paraffin block. <\/span><\/p>\n

So a piece of me was in Chicago during the heat wave, in Hyde Park, the only South Side neighborhood on the Chicago City \u201cHeat Death Poverty Map\u201d that was neither shaded in for poverty or heat deaths. That neighborhood was fine. Even my tumor had air conditioning (and white privilege).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are a lot of climate change documentaries and environmental documentaries. Your film has a unique approach. Can you talk about your style in wanting to make this film different than the usual?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I started out thinking we were just making a film about one city, one heatwave, one moment of extreme weather revealing acute disparity. I didn\u2019t think we would leave Chicago or even leave the history of the heatwave and just focus on the past. Some historical films stay in the past and only allow the connections to the present to occur in the audience members\u2019 minds.<\/span><\/p>\n

But I felt like in this case we couldn\u2019t just talk about the past, we had to talk about what the past helps us understand about the present.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I thought at first this film might be memory meets noir — we\u2019d find people who remembered the heatwave and it would be 90 minutes of meticulously examining it from many different perspectives, like a crime thriller meets the climate crisis meets the underlying disaster of extreme disparity and racism. <\/span><\/p>\n

And that might have been the case… but Hurricane Katrina hit the day we finished the trailer, which changed everything. I realized this was not a one-off, but instead another example of extreme weather revealing extreme underlying poverty and health disparity. I had no idea at the time that this would become a global paradigm and framework for discussing, and hopefully addressing, inequality and poverty in both the U.S. and globally in terms of the climate crisis\u2019 impact on individual communities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Katrina put disaster preparedness on everyone\u2019s radar. It also made me see the critical role that front-line grassroots organizations play during a disaster, in the wake of and in the struggle to demand and ensure that there is truly just <\/span>recovery, rebuilding and reinvestment in communities that are hurt the worst and were struggling to begin with. <\/span><\/p>\n

That led me to explore both the on-the-ground anchor organizations in Chicago who are racing to address and deal with health inequity, food insecurity, local economic development, school closings [and the list of issues and social entrepreneurship goes on] every day. And the health disparity and life-expectancy gap led me to ask what do we even mean by disaster? <\/span><\/p>\n

And that led me to the world of disaster preparedness, the only agency that has EMERGENCY in its title and has offices at every level of governance (local, county, city, state, federal). So that is how the story evolved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n