In COOKED: Survival by Zip Code, peabody award winning director Judith Helfand melds her unique brand of investigative reporting and respectful humor to make a potent argument that the best preparation for a disaster may start with actually redefining disaster and preparedness. COOKED: Survival by Zip Code will World Premiere at DOC NYC, screening November 11 and 14.
COOKED: Survival by Zip Code is a searing yet quirky investigation into the “natural” disasters we’re willing to see and prepare for and the “unnatural” ones we’re not. Adapted from Eric Klinenberg’s ground-breaking book HEAT WAVE: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.
In her signature serious-yet-quirky connect-the-dots style, Peabody Award winning filmmaker Judith Helfand takes audiences from the deadly 1995 Chicago heat disaster deep into one of our nation’s biggest growth industries — Disaster Preparedness. Along the way she forges inextricable links between extreme weather, extreme disparity and the politics of “disaster”; daring to ask: What if a zip code was just a routing number, and not a life-or-death sentence?
Chicago suffered the worst heat disaster in U.S history in 1995, when 739 residents ― mostly elderly, poor and disproportionately black―died over the course of one hot week. COOKED: Survival by Zip Code is a connect-the-dots investigation into extreme heat, the politics of disaster and survival by zip code. Helfand uses her quirky investigative lens to ask a radical yet obvious question: what if we reframe the long-term impact of structural racism, systemic inequity and climate change as an official disaster?
WORLD PREMIERE SCREENINGS AT DOC NYC
Sunday, November 11, 2018 at 1:30 PM
SVA Theatre
Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at 2:45 PM
IFC Center
Director Judith Helfand, producer Fenell Doremus, and author Eric Klinenberg in-person for post-screening Q&A’s after each screening.