Posts Tagged ‘lef foundation’

Betting The Farm is headed to Oakland!

Posted on: September 30th, 2011 by jason No Comments

We’ve been lucky enough to get the support of many organizations and individuals for our first feature documentary, Betting The Farm, from Sundance to LEF to Chicken & Egg to, of course, our parents. But the latest is among the coolest: We’ve been invited to be one of seven film projects in Reel Food, a residential workshop organized by the folks at Chicken & Egg Pictures, Working Films, and Fledgling Fund.

Reel Food: Films Seeding Change

Reel Food is a residential workshop that will bring together nonfiction media-makers who are telling powerful stories about food and agriculture with non-profit organizations that are working for healthy, just and sustainable communities. The intention of Reel Food is to hone filmmakers’ audience-engagement plans, seed collaboration and cross-promotion, and generate concrete partnerships between the documentary projects and NGOs.

After several years of filming (and intensive editing in recent months), we’re excited to have an opportunity to develop our outreach plans for the film. It’s exciting to imagine building a larger audience for this film with the help of some innovative organizations. Best of all, we get to meet and work with some amazing filmmakers. Can’t wait.

Interviewed on LEF’s blog

Posted on: June 13th, 2011 by jason No Comments

Sara Archambault of LEF Foundation, who has been a steadfast supporter of our film Betting The Farm from the beginning, interviewed us for LEF’s blog the other day about the process of shooting the film, the relationships we’ve built with our characters, and our brief video summary of the MOO Milk story for the New York Times:

Sara: You are shooting BETTING THE FARM at a time when a number of films are coming out exploring our relationship to food. Your film is unique in that it looks closely at farmers as small business owners and entrepreneurs. Can you talk about why you chose to focus on that experience?

Cecily Pingree: There have been a number of excellent films about food and food policy in the last several years, and we’ve learned that audiences really respond to these issues. They are vital human concerns, and they resonate across geographical, socioeconomic and cultural boundaries.

But we never set out to make a movie about the larger political and environmental issues at all. We stumbled on this story when we met one of the MOO Milk farmers, Aaron Bell of Tide Mill Organic Farm, while shooting another project. From the very beginning, we were interested in this story because of the people involved. Character-driven stories are what we like to watch, and what we get excited about, so it feels natural to us to focus on the lives of these farmers and their families rather than, say, the complexities of dairy pricing. That said, hopefully someone else will make that film!

Read the full interview here.

Think it’s interesting? Leave us a comment below or drop us a line!